Honing in on Hypocrisy … (05/03/15)
“Even to this day, our responsibility for the way we treat chickens and allow them to be treated is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence all objection: ‘How can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?’ … Well, one obvious answer is, simply by looking at her. It doesn’t take special insight or expertise to know that a hen confined in a battery cage or an overcrowded ‘free range’ coop is suffering, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that hens experience distress when their eggs are taken from them, and that they experience very real terror when they are hung upside down and have their throats slit while still fully conscious …
We are told that we humans are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know — except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our own victims. We are told we are being ‘too emotional’ if we care about a chicken or grieve over a chicken’s horrific plight. And yet it is not our emotion that is really under attack, but rather the very characteristics that make us human — the ability to empathize with another’s fear, the ability to show compassion for those in painful distress, the ability to stand in brave defense of those who are too weak to defend themselves.” ~ inspired by Karen Davis
P.S. We all have our quirks and inconsistencies — we all make occasional choices where our actions don’t match our values. And these little slip-ups are mostly just that; small bumps in our moral road — mistakes that can be overlooked and “sins” that can be easily forgiven. AND YET it bears saying that our hypocrisies become important and call for immediate redress when setting them in motion creates very real victims who experience very real suffering.
;