Some harsh facts for chicken eaters, like me.

Have you ever been to a children's science museum, where the children get to see chicks hatching from eggs? At these educational facilities, we teach our children about the innocence and beauty of the baby chicks. In addition to looking at them hatch, I like to eat chickens and their eggs. I always have. But this article and the undercover video that follows have really put me in a moral quandary.

An animal rights group publicized a video Tuesday showing unwanted chicks being tossed alive into a grinder at an Iowa plant and accused egg hatcheries of being "perhaps the cruelest industry" in the world.
I promote this ghastly system whenever I eat the chickens and eggs sold at most grocery stores in the U.S. There's no way around it. Perhaps one solution is to open up chicken factories to school groups, so that the children and their families can learn about the process leading up to that admittedly delicious meal of chicken strips. Then, we can make more informed decisions at the grocery store.

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Read more about the article What’s in a title? The inspiration for “Mother and Child Reunion”
The Story Behind Mother and Child Reunion

What’s in a title? The inspiration for “Mother and Child Reunion”

I heard this story years ago and it always draws a chuckle or a grimmace. The Story Behind Mother and Child Reunion Musician Paul Simon once had a big hit song called "Mother and Child Reunion."    The lyrics included the following: But I would not give you false hope On…

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The platypus: a fantastically transitional life form

Neil Shubin recently published a book celebrating the discovery of a life form that clearly constitutes a transitional life form: tiktaalik, a fish that crawled out of the water by use of its rudimentary limbs. In a post in which I described Shubin's book (Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into…

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A Martian anthropologist tries to understand Easter.

I enjoy chatting with Martian anthropologists.  They visit Earth without preconceptions and they ask obvious questions. 

Recently, I encountered a Martian anthropologist who was struggling to understand what Easter was all about.    I tried to explain it in simple terms.  I first tried to tell the Martian Anthropologist (I think it was a “she,” so I’ll use the feminine pronoun) about Good Friday. I told her that a magic fellow named Jesus dies every year on Good Friday and the Christians get all glum, even though He doesn’t really die every year, and we’re not entirely sure that there was a Jesus or that he was truly magic.

I paused, then explained further.  I told her that Catholics are my favorite kind of Christians because I was raised Catholic and because they strive so hard to not eat meat on Good Friday.  She asked why they didn’t eat meat and I said I didn’t know, especially since they eat fish and fish seems to be meat.  At church, it gets even stranger, I explained.  Catholics eat bread that they claim was “transubstantiated” into the actual body of Jesus (even though it still looks and tastes like bread.  The ironic twist is that this bread is supposedly meat and the Catholics eat it on Good Friday, even though they promise not to eat meat on Good Friday

Then, every year on Easter Sunday Jesus is said to rise from the dead and save us, even though we weren’t the one’s …

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