A dog is not a person...

And neither is a chicken.

Yesterday my boss told us about a story she read in Dear Abby. A father had written in to complain that his son, a sports fan who would get very angry when his favorite teams lost, would take out his frustration by beating the family's dog. The father wanted to know how he could convince his wife to get rid of the dog.

At this point in the story the phone rang and my boss answered it, so I was left talking to a certain 19 year old security guard. He was saying that if he was the kid's father he would beat his kid and push his kid down the stairs. I'm sure he wasn't serious as he frequently says shocking things just to maintain a certain level of "asshole". So I said, "but then the punishment would be worse than the actual offense." He replied, "no, because the kid had beaten the dog." It occurred to me that the guard regarded his suggested punishment as a fulfillment of some kind of "eye for an eye" justice and was regarding the person and the dog as entities of equal dignity. I said, "a dog is not a person." He said, "to some people a dog is a person." My boss agreed with him.

Okay. Just because someone treats their dog like a person does not mean the dog becomes a person. They were suggesting to me a kind of shifty reality in which someone's mere thought has the power to change fact. Which by default means that there is no such thing as absolute truth. I don't agree. There IS absolute truth, and no matter how wrong animal cruelty may be, the same cruelty to a person will always be worse. And since truth is absolute, I have to let it inform all aspects of my personal life no matter how difficult it may be.

Today two of my chicks died in the mouth of my neighbor's peppy blue healer. My default is to break down and cry, but still, a pea-brained $3 chicken with a fleeting life span is not worth such deep sorrow. I named them people's names, but that doesn't make my dear chicks people.

RIP Hailey the Golden Comet and Judy the Barred Rock.

If I keep chicken farming there are bound to be many more instances like this in my future.