Compassion

Back in the day when our flock of chickens in Kansas included a rooster we had a hen who went broody and sat on a clutch of nine eggs. In due time the chicks hacked their way out of their shells. Eight chicks were perfect, but the ninth seemed to be malformed. On the second day when I visited the nest I found the malformed chick lying on the concrete floor instead of in the nest with its siblings.

I gently picked up the chick, which was quite alive, and put it back in the nest under the mother hen’s wing. Later, when I went back to gather eggs, I found the chick on the floor again and again I placed it back in the nest. Immediately the hen used her beak to shove the chick out onto the floor. I put it back in the nest once more, but the next morning the chick was dead on the floor. Clearly the hen recognized the chick’s deformity and refused to care for it.

The Hawaiians used to do something like that. (James Mitchener wrote about it in his novel Hawaii.) A baby that was born with defects was placed on a mountainside to die. Even so small a defect as a red birthmark was a baby's doom.

Now, of course, we are horrified by the thought of abandoning a newborn human, of leaving it to die. We go to extraordinary lengths to preserve life, spending millions of dollars to keep a defective baby alive.

We are compassionate people. President George W. Bush pushed for a federal law called “No Child Left Behind.” The law required that public schools must accept disabled children, no matter how severe their damage. It also required that every child in every grade must regularly take standardized tests to assess their progress.

My daughter teaches fourth grade in a Colorado public school. She has several learning disabled children in her class each year, along with average and gifted students. This year one student is in a wheelchair and is accompanied all day by a nurse. The child is unable to move or talk and must be fed through a feeding tube. Not only is she incapable of learning anything, she also disrupts the entire classroom by screaming and shrieking throughout the day. This is compassion run amok, I believe.

Draw your own conclusions from these ramblings about chicken behavior and public school policy. And, if you will, help me find the rational middle.

Copyright 2016 by Shirley Domer