The evil that men do

On a recent trip to Amsterdam, I happened to walk through Dam Square one evening as an animal rights demonstration was going on, in this case trying to educate people about the uneccesary cruelty of the methods used to commercially rear pig and battery farmed chickens. I don't know who was running it, but they had come up with the clever idea of building a man-sized battery of cages to show the kind of conditions that chickens live in, in a way that people might relate to.

I've always been a big supporter of humane treatment of animals (such as, hey, I don't know . . . not eating them against their will, for example) but it's a difficult idea to promote as the abuse of animals is such a widely accepted practice in the world. As a rule I don't attempt to proselytise about this, because I've found that it turns people off and those who are open to the idea are more easily influenced by confident self assurance than a rant delivered from the moral high ground.

Anyway, the Dutch guys who did this got a lot of attention, so I thought it was a good idea.