I’ve always argued that animals are different from people, not superior to them or inferior to them. I am re-thinking this. The chickens are teaching me that animals are, in so many ways,  superior to human beings. The Red Hen was shut out of the coop and kept away from the block and their food for days, they were afraid of her, she was different, they did not want to let her in.

In two or three days, the fear and hatred of the strange subsided, the natural instincts of animals of the same species to get along and let one another be asserted itself. This morning, for the first time,  the hens let the Red Hen in. They let her peck at the birdseed, they let her sit on the porch with them and sun themselves and clean their feathers.

On the human side, no such progress, wretched, cold and starving people suffer horribly in vast encampments far  from their homes and families while our politicians and people who call themselves religious preen and cluck like the hens, only the noise they make sounds to me like fear and hatred, not acceptance and generosity.

So the Red Hen is no longer a refugee, she has been accepted into the fabric of Bedlam Farm. She seems safe, is well fed, and has joined the peaceable kingdom here.

I’m happy for the Red Hen, I’ve lived with animals long enough to know they are always eager to protect themselves, but they don’t live with one another in hatred and judgment. I don’t know how any animal can be more superior to human beings than that.