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Karen Davis #moonbat #crackpot #psycho upc-online.org

While I would not dream of using arguments to diminish the horror of the September 11 attack for thousands of people, I would also suggest that the people who died in the attack did not suffer more terrible deaths than animals in slaughterhouses suffer every day. Moreover, the survivors of the September 11 attack and their loved ones have an array of consolations-patriotism, the satisfaction of U.S. retaliation, religious faith, TV ads calling them heroes, etc--that the chickens, whose lives are continuously painful and miserable, including being condemned to live in human-imposed circumstances that are inimical and alien to them as chickens, do not have available. They suffer raw, without the palliatives. Doubtless the majority, if not every single one, of the people who suffered and/or died as a result of the September 11 attack ate, and if they are now alive continue to eat, chickens. It is possible to argue, using (Peter Singer's) utilitarian calculations, that the deaths of thousands of people whose trivial consumer satisfactions included the imposition of fundamental misery and death on hundreds of thousands of chickens reduced the amount of pain and suffering in the world.

In conclusion, I think it is speciesist to think that the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a greater tragedy than what millions of chickens endured that day and what they endure every day because they cannot defend themselves against the concerted human appetites arrayed against them. Perhaps the word "tragedy" should not be used anyway in this context unless in the more precise sense of a fundamentally terrible thing happening to a human being who consciously or subconsciously brought the terrible thing upon him or herself, lived through it, and gained insight and wisdom as a result. In this classical sense of tragic drama, it remains to be seen whether America is a "tragic hero" or even a "tragic" victim. If, though, the question is whether the World Trade Center attack was worse for its thousands of human victims than the sum total of misery and terror was for millions of chicken victims that day, I see only one nonspeciesist answer to the question.

Karen Davis #moonbat upc-online.org

On January 8, 2020, passenger flight 752, headed from the Iranian capital of Tehran to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, killing all 176 occupants, including 167 passengers. The jet continued flying for several minutes before turning back toward the airport. According to The New York Times, “The plane, which by then had stopped transmitting its signal, flew toward the airport ablaze before it exploded and crashed quickly”.

One can only imagine being strapped in a plane that is about to crash, being, in the final moments before death, a conscious individual, helpless in a cage. In considering such circumstances, is it impertinent to compare this experience with that of chickens (any animals) hanging face down on a slaughter line as it moves toward a large rotating knife that will cut their throats? Is the terror of the chickens any less palpable in those final moments than the terror of the airline passengers hurled helplessly toward their own deaths?

Even granting the terror the chickens must be feeling, there are those who are outraged by the very idea of comparing anything a chicken might feel with the feelings of a human being, for the simple reason that, no matter what, the feelings and nature of humans are considered “superior to” and vastly “more important than” those of any other sentient species – a view not shared by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson or by me.

Probably, if questioned, few people, even those who grant that other animals can form lasting emotional relationships amongst themselves, would concede that their experiences could equal the range and depth of human social and familial experience.

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Among land animals, chickens constitute the largest, most expanding universe of pain and suffering on the planet. There is no fate worse, no suffering worse, no injustice worse than what has befallen chickens in their encounter with human beings. For them, every torturing second of being alive in our grasp is as bad as it gets. I therefore submit that the continuous, unrelieved suffering of chickens and other intensively-farmed animals compares in magnitude, intensity, and injustice with the suffering of human beings in horrific plane crashes and similar episodes of massive violence.