Does anyone else notice that when it comes to animal cruelty, people are quick to take a stand, but when people are being massacred — Rwanda or Darfur, anyone? — the crowds can be pretty quiet.
The Independent reported on changes in consumer behavior in the UK after a campaign about the cruelty of care for boiler chickens. As a result, free range chickens have seen sales soar.
Turns out consumers would rather buy no chicken at all than to purchase abused chickens. (This chicken tale is also further proof that consumers will pay a premium for a product that that respects the raw materials.)
On the other hand we have cruelty against human kind. On a local level, I will never forget my freshman year at UPenn. That spring alcohol was banned on campus after the death of an alum at a fraternity’s reunion weekend. Over 1000 students showed up on college green to protest the alcohol ban. In the same time frame a group of students were protesting Penn’s link to sweatshop labor (the high price of Penn branded clothing wass not due to its fair-labor-friendly practices). About a dozen students staged a sit-in to demonstrate against the sweat shop labor, camping out in the president’s office for a week. It just wasn’t right.
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I disagree that there is more discourse about animal cruelty than there is about the situation in Darfur, for example. Neither topic gets the press and attention they deserve. And to assume that we should only care about humans and not animals – or that we only have the capacity for one or the other – isn’t giving us enough credit. We can care about humans AND non-human animals, and compassion for one should only increase compassion for the other.
I did not say that we should care about only humans; I just find it ironic that we frequently have more compassion for a species other than our own.