Baby Ducks... Baby Chicks
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM EarthlingEd
November 2020

When confronted with dissonance the person has two choices, either change their behaviour, or attempt to justify it... We can either go vegan, or try and justify continuing to pay for someone else to kill animals.

We see stories such as this one, “Florida Man Gets Year in Jail For Running over Baby Ducks with a Lawn Mower”, where a man was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to have a mental health evaluation because he macerated baby ducks with a lawnmower, and we think what sort of person could do such a thing?

And yet every year around 7 billion male chicks are killed as soon as they are born, often by being macerated. So why is there an outcry when a man macerates 9 ducklings, but not when we macerate billions of chicks?

These are examples of cognitive dissonance, a psychological concept coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. Cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort people feel when someone’s behaviours and values contradict each other and the subsequent attempt that they make to try and ensure that their values are consistent in their own minds.⁣

Dissonance becomes most evident when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical and competent. And so when confronted with dissonance the person has two choices, either change their behaviour, or attempt to justify it. And so in the case of what we do to animals, we can either go vegan, or try and justify continuing to pay for someone else to kill animals.

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