“Have you ever thought how it would feel To be a cow, or horse say, munching grass In some wet field with flies all round your eyes,

No hands to shoo them off, or worse, To be a chicken in a battery farm

Under the lights all day and night, the smell And the heat, or a sheep, or a sow In a truck on the way to the abbatoir?

I mean – to be really inside the animal’s head

To see what it sees, to feel what it feels, Its fear and its pain

Or just the plain discomfort of its life.

Can you think as an animal would?

Chuang Tzu did it.

Long ago when the pharaohs reigned

He dreamed he was a butterfly

And when he woke he wondered

If he really were a butterfly

Dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

We too need to practise such a seeing

Through another being’s eyes, that way Perhaps we might become more loth

To kill and torture one another

And learn to treat each fellow being as a brother.”

By: Peter Crowther

To learn more about Peter Crowther, Click here or on his name.

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