Just as we are emerging from one pandemic, another appears on the horizon, but it doesn’t seem to affect humans – yet. It’s avian flu that has infected thousands of chickens and caused the skyrocketing price of eggs. Entire flocks have had to be culled -- a polite word for killed.
But if you look at the way most egg layers and chickens are kept, it shouldn’t surprise you that avian flu has spread so quickly. Most are still caged and forced to live in a space a little larger than a shoebox. Evidently, free range chickens become infected to a lesser extent.
Doesn’t it make sense that we rethink how we grow and treat all animals that end up on the dinner plate? In fear that people may be affected by how meat and poultry are treated, some states have passed laws criminalizing the publication of photos of factory farms calling it terrorism. The real terrorism is how we treat the animals we eat.
Prayer for the Day
Source of our being, we know you are the source of all life,
The root of our faith and our promise of redemption;
You have given us the power of imagination
To transform the world from death to life. May your words catch our hearts as well as our minds
Teaching us the power of love and humility.
We ask this in the name of the One who is the face of your love,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord.
Thoughts for the Day
Factory farms don’t even consider animals to be real living things. They consider them to be protein units per square foot.
- Senita Etrawoo, American novelist
When you start with a necessary evil, and then over time the necessity passes away, what's left?
- Matthew Scully, American writer on animal welfare, from Dominion
God said, “See I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.
Genesis 1:29-30