Anyway, an interesting, if that's the right word for it, op-ed appeared in the Oakland Tribune today. Penned by Vasile Stanescu, it argues that, understandably, slaughtering chickens in one's Oakland backyard isn't cool. While she he briefly mentions that the act of lopping off Mr Little's head is neither hygienic nor calming to a quiet neighborhood, she he goes on to suggest that backyard slaughtering could indoctrinate violence and, quite possibly, lead to people-on-people murder.

In part, she he writes:

However, as a student and teacher of philosophy, these are actually not the issues I want to focus on. For throughout philosophy, there have been a host of thinkers who were opposed to the killing of animals because of the way it would harm human compassion. Immanuel Kant, for example, cites the British law against butchers serving on a jury.

And psychology research has borne out this same moral intuition. For example, a 1997 Northeastern University and Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals found that people who hurt animals were five times more likely to commit violent crimes against people and than people who did not.

And, as reported by the Humane Society, a 2001-2004 study by the Chicago Police Department "revealed a startling propensity for offenders charged with crimes against animals to commit otherviolent offenses toward human victims."

Nor is indoctrination of violence reserved for only adults. As Joel Salatin, the most famous advocate for backyard slaughter, phrased it: We have not found any child under 10 that's the least bit put off by it. They get right into it. We'll even give them a knife and let them slice some throats.

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Read the entire chilling piece at Oakland Tribune.