Amen.

I find your Lenten commitment laudible, and as a Catholic praise your desire to live a vegetarian lifestyle – something that puts you in firm solidarity with the monks and nuns of the early church who went into the dessert and lived on bitter herbs and bread so as to remove themselves from the cycle of violence and cause no harm.

When you offer “Just because chickens don’t have souls doesn’t mean we are supposed to take care of them.” And this is true and fair. But please let’s be careful not to create a straw man of my argument (I never said we were to NOT be good stewards or in fact WERE supposed to torture animals) OR create a false dichotomy that either one is a vegan or one does not respect animals.

As a Greek Catholic the paiting of pisanky – those very, very colorful easter eggs that are so well painted with the yolks blown out so as to preserve them for generations – is a big tradition in my family and my church. I can’t help but bristle a bit if it is intimated that the consumption of eggs which is good and life giving is a source of scandal for being considered on par with unfertilized human eggs.

This doesn’t consitute animal sacrifice, and the consumption we take part in as other animals is part of the order of nature in this disordered fallen world.

So I respect and applaud your efforts. But let’s be careful to not fall into logical fallacies or misrepresentations of why we do what we do.

I was showing another way of looking at what we do every year on Easter.

I wasn’t equating eating chicken with torturing chicken (although I also don’t find that to be harm-free).

I was equating keeping chicken in cages so small they can’t stand up with torture.
I was equating burning their beaks off with torture.
I’d also probably equate refusing them materials to be comfortable a form of torture.

I am trying to be vegan, that doesn’t mean I expect everyone in the world to become vegan. What I do expect is for these animals to be treated with respect.

Just because chickens don’t have souls doesn’t mean we aren’t supposed to take care of them. God gave us dominion over them to protect them, not torture them needlessly.

And the tradition set forth is that as unique among creation we are permitted sustenance in this fashion – Biblical accounts of consuming meat are manifold.

It is all well and good if you opt to not consumer meat. As a Greek Catholic for the better part of Lent we observe basically a vegan fast…

But to compare chicken eggs to human eggs or consumption of chircken to the torture of women… No, as Catholics we simply don’t equate the consumption of eggs as animal sacrifice or on par with murder.

And for the record, the average hen lays 220+ eggs a year, and the eggs we eat from the market are unfertilized. Would you be of the thinking that it is better to have the chicken population grow exponentially covering the earth, or to waste unfertilized eggs that can sustain our life?