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Loading...Baseball Players Sacrifice Baby Chickens for Luck
The players allegedly killed the two chickens in some kind of pseudo-voodoo ritual meant to improve the team’s performance as they’ve suffered a losing streak recently. The two boys are 15 and 16 years old and have not been named publicly as they are minors.
The coach of the team says that while he has not had a chance to speak with the two players personally, he thinks that the superstitious nature of the sport is to blame. He told reporters that “baseball is very superstitious” and that he theorizes that the idea for the ritual may have come from the movie Major League in which a superstitious character is determined to sacrifice a chicken for good luck.
The two boys have been charged with cruelty to animals and their case will be heard in juvenile court. They’ve also been kicked off the team for the year.
The actions of these two boys are reprehensible, almost beyond imagining. It’s hard enough to imagine killing a baby chick, let alone doing it for as petty and meaningless a purpose as improving your sports teams’ performance.
But it begins to seem kind of trivial when you put their actions in perspective. For example, the egg industry kills 200 million baby chicks per year because they were unlucky enough to be born male and the egg industry has no use for male chicks. These chicks are crushed up alive by a meat grinder. This is done even by the “compassionate” cage-free companies.
And the worst part? Grinding up 200 million chicks a year is legal, but killing two in a sacrifice for a better baseball season results in being arrested for cruelty to animals.
In the movie Major League, which the coach of the team cited as a possible origin for the ritual, the players convince the superstitious player to have a bucket of fried chicken instead of sacrifice a chicken. There’s a connection here, but no one is mentioning it.
These boys have grown up in a culture that practices a sophisticated double-think that even adults have trouble justifying. We kill some animals by the billions and then prosecute people for killing just one or two of a different kind of animal. It’s not a child’s fault for being confused about what kinds of animals it is culturally acceptable to kill and under what circumstances it is legal to do so.
Of course, these boys need a lesson in treating life with the respect it deserves, but who can really give them that lesson? A culture that endorses and promotes wholesale slaughter of chickens by the billions can’t really castigate these two boys because they killed baby chicks on a baseball diamond instead of in a factory with a meat grinder.
If we want children to understand that killing animals is wrong, we should start leading by example. If we start by explaining that it’s wrong to kill animals for food, then it won’t be so hard to explain later why it’s wrong to kill animals in ritual sacrifices. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that a child raised vegan would even need to be told not to sacrifice animals. It seems like the ritual sacrifice issue would be a moot point very early on.
If you abhor cruelty and murder, go vegan and lead by your example.
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Read more: animal abuse, animal welfare, baseball, chickens, ritual sacrifice, rituals, vegan
Photo: Cryostasis
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for your post , good reading, I will pass it along.
Great article. Thanks.
.....If you are using a chain to pull a load, every single link in that chain is necessary in order to pull the load. In this case, the farmers rearing the hens, (probably in factory farms), the catchers of the hens once they're no longer commercially viable to keep alive (working piece rate), drivers taking hens to slaughter houses, the workers in the factory loading the chicks onto the conveyor belt leading to the grinding machine...and last but by certainly no means least...the consumer of the eggs...who ate the eggs in all "innocence." Every single one of you is culpable and an accessory to the crime.
Bill C: You are very good at manipulating peoples comments and taking them out of context, you must be a lawyer. Either that or a politician.
Veganism isn't a "cure" for superstition, ofcourse it isn't, that's not what Mac is saying at all - he's merely pointing out the double standards that some people have - ie that it's wrong to kill when it's for superstition but acceptable when it's for products that none of us need anyway.
Some folk continue to spout the evolutionary rhetoric: that because we evolved to eat meat that we should continue to do it. In early human days we had primitive brains that possibly didn't give a thought to such issues as compassion and ecology. In those days animals weren't raised on factory farms, many of the animals would have been hunted so there wouldn't have been a land clearance issue in those cases. They didn't have to suffer the terrible existences they're now forced to endure. They didn't suffer the trauma of knowing they were about to die in slaughter houses.
We now know that we can live well without sacrificing animals and instead, live a more ecologically sound lifestyle by living directly off the land rather than indirectly via animals.
To those defending the actions of some because they weren't aware of what of what's going on in the factory farms, live export and slaughter houses - well, they can't claim ignorance any more, can they! There's a world of information out there, omnivores, it's called the Internet! If you
I am thinking about going vegan.
How can we get so excited about two youths -- near armed forces age -- killing baby chicks when our GOVERNMENT sends young men and women overseas to kill civilians and all living things over OIL! We listen to the lies and let ourselves say, "Oh, we're not like that" but we are if our government is!!! You and I and everyone in the USA is guilty of what our so-called 'democracy' perpetrates!
I don't hold with animal sacrifice. These kids need some guidance. But this is not the worst thing our society does.
two wrongs don't make a right, three rights make a left, and if going left means being right, then... I HOPE YOU GO RIGHT TO JAIL
Why do we think this generation is going to be less prone to acts of stupidity any less than ALL of us in our formative years. Go rummage in your own closet and remember what you would have, or should now, appologize for.
The successful guides lead by example, the bad ones attempt by pushing a string. You figure the outcome.
Teens are the works in progress with the longest way to go. Give guidence and understanding, not public execution.
They will have a better change of conforming to what the best us us think we are.
I'm sorry, but I have not sorrow for the boys. They are old enough to know right from wrong. They should be punished period.
The fact is these two boys have no sense of empathy for animals and neither do psychopaths! The are old enough to know that this was an act of cruelty!
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