Little Heartbreaks and Big Heartaches
A Look at our Feathered Comrades
When I drive home from work along this one short stretch of the busy 4-lane highway, I often see a pair of Canada geese standing in the grassy area to the side of the road. There is no lake or other waterway nearby, and I’ve often wondered at this choice of a home for these beautiful birds. Today, I was entering the highway from a side street, and while waiting at the red light, I glanced up and saw the pair. They looked as though they were attempting to cross the road. Then I realized they had at least two or three tiny downy goslings tottering along beside them. One of the adults would attempt to cross the road, and make a threatening gesture as a car would swerve to avoid hitting them. The other one (presumably the female) was more guarded about crossing and was herding the young ones back to the safety of the tall grass on the side. The tender beauty of the chick’s downy feathers and newborn waddle really touched me.
This little vignette was so touching and poignant to me that it made me cry. Who would really care about this one little tiny story of a couple of creatures in the vast universe? But it was so heart-breakingly beautiful to me to watch the male goose challenging a two-thousand pound car hurling down the road. How would he know that it wasn’t just another predator? After all, he was the father goose, the big and strong protector of his family. The innocence and beauty of that simple gesture melts and breaks my heart at the same time.
Of course, this led to me thinking of the millions upon millions of tiny baby male chickens, products of the egg industry, who are discarded, alive, into waste bins, peeping and crying until they suffocate or are crushed to death. Of the females, roughly grabbed and held up to a hot iron to burn off their tiny little beaks so they won’t peck one another to death when they are imprisoned into tiny cages with dozens of other birds for the entirety of their lives. Of the mother hens who lay egg after egg after egg despite the utter impossibility of ever being allowed sit on one single nest or hatch one single egg for her entire life. Of the same birds who, having been “spent” are grabbed by the feet and thrown into crates, piled into trucks and transported to the slaughterhouse where they are hung by their feet and scalded to death to become “poultry by-product.”
These birds, too, are beautiful and worthy of a life. They deserve the chance to parent young chicks and to threaten a predator. But the predator is you and me, and we are a universe removed from their suffering.
