Thousands of Chickens Burn Alive; CCF Is Amused

[Edit: When you're done reading this post, wander over to this related post about a similar fire that has since taken place.]

The Center for Consumer Freedom and its unscrupulous mouthpiece are fond of pretending that they do care about at least basic animal welfare but that they're just "normal" about it, as opposed to those of us who are extreme--that is, those of us who really care about eliminating unnecessary suffering rather than just occasionally pretending to care for sake of PR. Well, here's one of those great examples of how much they care:

What's he referring to? What's so funny that it calls for his trademark flippancy and sarcasm? Thousands of chickens were burned alive in Washington State late last night and early this morning. Clearly hilarious.

Fellow animals able to feel terror and pain every bit as much as you and I were trapped inside enormous sheds, while smoke joined the usual burning ammonia in their lungs, while they panicked, while they screamed out and flapped their wings as much as their cramped quarters and burdened bodies would allow, while they burned alive, trapped and with no hope of escape. And a propaganda artist who likes to set himself and his clients up as the level-headed ones, as the ones who represent the majority of Americans and consumers, thinks it's funny. He's just disappointed that they burned to a crisp inside a shed rather than on his grill. The panic, the horror, the terror, the pain--it's all irrelevant.

Screw you, Martosko. Screw you.

And while we're talking about this nightmare, exactly how many chickens died? Oh, we don't know yet, or at least it's not printed in the news stories I've located (this fire/rescue news site finds the story funny too apparently; "Chickens Fry in Washington Blaze," it quips). We just know it was in the "thousands." But we do know, of course, that the massive blaze caused $2.2 million in "damages." Money, as always, is what's important. Not unknown thousands of individual living beings, each one of whom had his or her own personality, each one of whom wanted to live, each one of whom suffered, in terror, as much in that fire as either you or I would have--and each one of whom undoubtedly suffered horribly up until those final terrible moments too.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote in a personal space about media reports on a fire in Boston in which countless lobsters died. There too, the real victims--the animals themselves--didn't matter. We didn't hear about how many lobsters died. We didn't read about how awful their deaths must have been--after all, they were just lobsters, and people were going to boil them alive anyway, right? Instead, the lamentations were over how many pounds of "lobster" were "lost," how much money went up in smoke.

I don't have the words to conclude this post poetically or wittily. I'm just too sad. I'm just too disappointed. I'm just too angry and in awe of human callousness and carelessness and lack of compassion. We are not the superior species we claim to be.