Empathy Poem by Pete Crowther

Have you ever thought how it would feel
To be a cow, or horse say, munching grass
In some wet field with flies all round your eyes,
No hands to shoo them off, or worse,
To be a chicken in a battery farm
Under the lights all day and night, the smell
And the heat, or a sheep, or a sow
In a truck on the way to the abbatoir?
I mean – to be really inside the animal’s head
To see what it sees, to feel what it feels,
Its fear and its pain
Or just the plain discomfort of its life.
Can you think as an animal would?

Chuang Tzu did it.
Long ago when the pharaohs reigned
He dreamed he was a butterfly
And when he woke he wondered
If he really were a butterfly
Dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.
We too need to practise such a seeing
Through another being’s eyes, that way
Perhaps we might become more loth
To kill and torture one another
And learn to treat each fellow being as a brother.