Save the shearwater! .... eat the cows?

State officials are asking O'ahu residents to turn down their lights at night for the next few weeks to help native seabirds find their way out to sea for the winter.

Wedge-tailed shearwater chicks on O'ahu's offshore islands are getting ready to migrate, and lights attract these young, inexperienced birds to shore when they should be following a moonlit path out to sea. Dead birds are found on roads, parking lots and lawns on the windward side of Oahu each year after the birds collide with poles, wires and buildings, so the state is requesting that we close our curtains and blinds to reduce the glow from indoor lights through Dec. 15.

Save the Shearwaters! This is great, we should of course do all we can to assist other living entities in their struggle for existence, this is laudable. However, this leads me to start wondering, why is there this great concern and compassion for birds on the part of the state, but gross negligence and violence toward other animals such as the cow, pig and chicken? Cows, for example, have a much larger brain than birds and thus likely feel more pain and suffering when having their throats slit at slaughter than birds may feel when they collide with a pole.

Who is qualified to decide that the shearwater is more important than the cow? Why has US society come to the conclusion that it is fine to slaughter over 10 billion animals per year, approx. 30 million a day? How is it that helping wild birds is considered good, whereas eating farm animals is also considered good? Most people who even think about this contradiction decide that eating animals is fine, and wonder, "What is the big deal?" Thus, the contradiction of trying to save one type of animal while eating another continues as it is relatively easy for us to close our curtains (to help shearwaters), but to give up the meat based diet we are addicted to is out of the question.

Thanks for reading.
Mark Fergusson