Omer 2019 Day 15: Chickens

Back to Day 14 | Skip to Day 16

Omer 2019 Day 15: Chesed in Tiferet, Loving-Kindness in Compassion

Chickens

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh from Pexels

Happy International Respect for Chickens Day! Rather than equating today's sephirot to the animal itself, this is a good opportunity to look at how we treat these animals that are often in our care.

As omnivores (animals that eat plants and animals), people are often faced with conflicting views on what the best way is to responsibly eat other living beings. While there are many ways to approach this topic (kashrut, vegetarian/veganism, eating organic, etc), and many different rationales behind a person's decisions surrounding food choices, possibly one of the most common threads behind a person's decision to eat more consciously is the desire to exhibit loving-kindness. Doing so by exhibiting compassion for an animal's natural tendencies and behaviors, and giving domesticated animals (or any animal with which humans interact) the opportunity to live their lives in the most natural and least stressful or painful way possible, is a great place to start thinking about the kinds of agencies/principles/organizations that we support in our food-purchasing decisions.

This year's animal Omer is a collaboration between myself and my friend Halli, a PhD in animal science. Thank you for counting the Omer with us!