We all fear for our lives…

In India, most small chicken shops sell live chickens by the kg. Chickens are kept in small rectangular cages and fed grains etc. till it’s their turn to go. The chickens just sit there and go peck, peck, peck, cluck, cluck, cluck. They eat and socialize with their cage-mates in their own way. Only until the shopkeeper suddenly opens the door of the cage to grab one…
there’s a customer here and one of you guys must be weighed….come on…come on…come on. The poor creatures know that one of them has got to go. They screech, scream (if I may call it that), flap, flutter in utter despair and run to the farthest possible end of the cage (which is not really very big…probably about 1.5 ft by 3 ft). The seller grabs one of them and plops the unlucky one onto a weighing scale, quotes his price and collects his money. The rest of the chickens in the cage settle down, for they know that they are out of danger, at least for now…till the door opens again. But the lone chicken that was caught continues to struggle and screech in fear till the end…its end. I’m not brave enough to even imagine the pain and struggle of these poor creatures.

When we lived in Dallas, in Tornado Alley, for a couple of years, and I have feared for my life whenever a warning siren went off. This would happen mostly in the evenings: there would be a terrible thunderstorm outside, and I would be glued to the weather channel, hoping there’d be no trouble. A tornado watch would have been issued…which would eventually turn into a warning. All of a sudden there would be a power outage and the warning siren would blare. My heart would be pounding as I would run along with my hubby and daughter to the closet, equipped with pillows, a flashlight and a cell phone. It was a funny game for my daughter, then 6, as she never knew about the impending danger. But my mind would be racing with all kinds of confusing thoughts. If a tornado were to strike, we were done for. We lived on the second floor of an apartment and were highly vulnerable. I would be praying that this would pass soon. Normalcy would be restored in the house only when the power would come back on and the Tornado Warning issued on Weather Channel would be taken off. We never got hit by a tornado. We were lucky. But the fear…it remains etched in my memory.

Most of us can recognize this fear. It has happened to us sometime, somewhere. If only we can empathize with animals… for unlike most animals, God has given us the capacity to think and understand higher logic. Go vegetarian.