Hello, and thank you for joining me today. I’m Karen Davis, the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes compassion and respect for chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other domesticated birds.
Today I want to speak to you about what I refer to as Ethical Deviance and the Ethical Deviant in Animal Rights Advocacy.
One of the saddest ironies in life is that there are probably people in every community who love and empathize with animals; only they don’t know that there are others among them who feel the same way. Fear of ridicule and rejection, isolation and ostracism, causes people to scare one another into silence and submission and compliance.
Ethical Deviance is the element in society that prevents socialization from becoming a prison. The Ethical Deviant opens a window to let in fresh air, fresh ideas and perceptions. The Ethical Deviant is someone within a society who will not grow up to be just another replica. The Ethical Deviant reassures people whose sensibilities have not gone totally underground, or been beaten to death, that they are not “crazy” for caring about a chicken, for example. The Ethical Deviant strengthens the courage of other caring people, validating and affirming their struggling feelings.
In a very important sense, the Ethical Deviant is what the poet William Wordsworth called a “child” who has matured into an adult who never lost the sense of wonder toward the world. In his poem, Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth contrasts his instinctual, unreflecting passion for Nature as a child with the “years that bring the philosophic mind.” The Ethical Deviant’s primal sympathy with, and insight into, the life of other beings, matures to become the conscious sensibility, awareness and purposefulness of the adult. This person is the poet, the peacemaker, the social justice activist, the animal rights advocate – the “Outsider” from the standpoint of tradition and convention – the person who keeps the consciousness and the conscience of society alive and growing.
The struggle between conscience and callousness isn’t just between the self, “in here,” so to speak, and society “out there.” The struggle takes place among conflicting impulses within our nature in response to situations we find or put ourselves in. For example, running a sanctuary for chickens, I can tell you that whereas I like mice and raccoons ontologically, I am not fond of them situationally. There’s an ethical struggle among competing forces, feelings and obligations even within a sanctuary and a sanctuary provider.
For some people, it may be that becoming vegan changes them to feel more peaceful inside, but that hasn’t been my experience. Instead as I once wrote:
“Veganism has made me more conscious of behavior patterns that are not consistent with my adherence to philosophical veganism. Being vegan has not made my personality more peaceful, as by some sort of physiological or mystical transformation or holistic purification. What it has done is to make me intellectually more aware of my feelings and behavior and less able to rationalize and do certain things that I might otherwise overlook.”
One thing very important is that we must never take for granted that people, “over 25,” are unreachable, unteachable, or dispensable in our quest to make compassion and respect for animals, and empathy for the natural world, part of the socialization process. Not only is this assumption wrong, but children who are surrounded by adults who don’t support their compassionate feelings suffer in lonely isolation and confusion, and will often turn against themselves, and against animals, violently for having sensitive feelings that no one they looked up to, and were dependent upon, when they were little, seemed to understand or share.
In a wonderful book for children called A Boy, A Chicken & The Lion of Judah: How Ari Became A Vegetarian by Roberta Kalechofsky, a 9-year-old boy named Ari, who loves his pet chicken Tk Tk, and hates eating meat, feels very lonely in a world oblivious to the suffering of the chickens caged in the local poultry shop. Even his environmentalist parents, who care about saving wild birds, don’t connect the caged chickens with their environmentalist concerns. What unexpectedly brings comfort, courage, and validation to Ari is his discovery that his teacher, Ms. Greenblatt, is a vegetarian, and so is her brother, a soccer player!
The point I wish to make here is that our best hope for changing the world for the better isn’t children by themselves. Our best hope is children supported by adults who have nurtured their own primal sympathies to maturity.
To conclude, I’d like to say that the unanimous decision by the Utah jury on October 8, 2022 finding Wayne Hsiung and Paul Darwin Picklesimer not guilty of what the prosecutor called the “burglary” of two suffering piglets from a Smithfield factory farm showed two things relevant to my idea of the Ethical Deviant. One is that Wayne Hsiung, in his self-defense, including his eloquent testimony and justification for rescuing the piglets, exemplifies my characterization of the Ethical Deviant in society. The other thing is that this jury, from a very conservative state like Utah, did not, as had been expected by many of us, follow an automatic course of conventionalized opposition to two animal rights activists. Instead they showed, by their decision, that people “over 25” are as necessary to ethical progress and hopefulness for animals as any child can be, and that they can teach their children well, and are urgently, so urgently, needed to do so.
I hope that you have found today’s podcast informative and inspiring on behalf of animals and animal rights activism, and that you will share it with your social media network, and help to increase the number of Ethical Deviants in this world. Thank you very much for joining me today, and, please join me for the next podcast episode of Thinking Like a Chicken – News & Views! And have a wonderful day.