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.

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

I don't usually cite every "new vegan eatery" story, and lord knows I've skipped a few months of declaring this title, but I couldn't pass up the context provided along with this story, headed by the line "Slaughterhouse site gives way to 'cruelty-free' fare":

Order a pizza or a sub at T.J. Scallywaggle's in Allston, and you'll get soy-based cheese, or mock meat made with soy protein, but no animal products. Go back a couple of centuries, however, and animal products were all you could have found on that site.

A report published by the Massachusetts Board of Health in 1870 described how these 19th-century slaughterhouses produced large quantities of animal waste. A "putrid mass, consisting of blood, the excrement of the animals killed, the half-digested food contained in the entrails, and the offal itself is scraped and banked up on the ground (often very spongy) or carted off to be spread upon land. The track of these carts is evident both to sight and smell."

ANOTHER ASTONISHING FRIDAY COINCIDENCE

Well, this is getting into Twilight Zone territory, no? By completely random chance, exactly one week after the previous big beef recall was announced on a Friday - when unfortunately and ironically almost no consumers would hear about it - there was yet another beef recall, twice as large as the previous week's, also announced on a Friday!

Maybe Rod Serling or Mr. Spock can explain this, because it sure seems there's something going strangely awry with the laws of probability. Couldn't be because of any human decision-making, of course, because such a decision would clearly put companys' short-term profit over American consumers' lives, and we know that wouldn't happen.