I live near an intensive egg-production unit. Occasionally hens escape. Should I catch them and return them to the owner of the business where, of course, they will be returned to “prison”? Or give them to a friend who keeps hens free-range?
You’re not alone in feeling that the status of chickens and eggs has tumbled since the days when they were fêted as the first philosophical conundrum to intrigue man (did the chicken come first, or was the chicken merely the egg’s idea for getting more eggs?) — a descent mirrored in the noble egg’s gastronomic decline from “Benedict” and “Florentine” to “ McMuffin”.
There is a perfectly good way to stop your neighbouring egg factory from treating its hens in a way that you find unsettling, and that’s to stop buying eggs from such producers.
Under your proposal, you would, in effect, be stealing the hens (it is stealing, I’m afraid: would you regard as yours, to do with as you pleased, an iPod that someone had dropped in your street)?
By then passing the hens on to a kinder home, you become no longer just an observer cheering the hens on to freedom; you become an active participant in their abduction, however well intentioned. (A more laissez-faire approach might be neither to steal the hens and transfer them to your friend, nor to take undue pains to return them to their rightful owner — thereby allowing the escaped fowl a delicious taste of freedom; but only until a fox caught them for supper).
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Stealing hens for their own good? Where would you draw the line?
Would you not hand a lost iPod to police to relocate its rightful owner if you noticed that its owner had misguidedly loaded it with tracks by Coldplay and James Blunt?
FACING A DILEMMA
Have you a dilemma of your own? Write to Modern Morals, Times Features, 1 Pennington Street, London, E98 1TT. Email: modernmorals@thetimes.co.uk