UNBELIEVABLE

Another news item that would be funny if there weren't so much death and stupidity associated with it: "Five chickens from a primary school hutch have been decapitated in a sickening act of animal cruelty. Police believe the offenders ripped the chooks' heads off with their bare hands early yesterday." The RSPCA official called this one of the worst acts of animal cruelty he had ever heard of and compared the culprits to serial killers. "It's unbelievable that somebody could kill a chicken by physically ripping its head off. It's very disturbing and it's an extreme type of cruelty," Mr Boland said.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Killing chickens by ripping their heads off is "unbelievable" and "disturbing" cruelty, while shackling them by the neck and delivering them, "stunned" (not), to a decapitating blade is just shoulder-shrugging business-as-usual. Of course the storytelling has to dance around the real problem, because as we all know the distinction has nothing to do with the way the chickens died, but the fact that these chickens were not meant as food products - they had been ensouled by the schoolkids, and thus were magically elevated to a different form of being whose death is cruel and disturbing. In all seriousness, this is how the mainstream is forced to think about the deaths of animals. Funny, almost.