It is cold, snowing and the car headlights snap on as twilight descends over the final kilometers of the trip back from the Big Smoke.

Twilight means it is dinner time and we are hungry, but have little enthusiasm for thinking about cooking dinner. There are other chores: shovelling to the front door, firing up the woodstove, checking the water system to see if anything has frozen.
Dinner is not a real concern because our car is filled with the delightful aroma of freshly roasted chicken. It is coming from one of those seasoned rotisserie chickens that you buy at take-out food counters in stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and others.

When the chores are done, just pull the plump and tender roasted chicken from its plastic container, set it beside a salad, grab a slice or two of bread and voila – supper. No fuss, no mess and delicious for only $7.99 (plus tax of course) at Costco. (In a U.S. Costco it’s $4.99 American, a price that hasn’t changed in more than 10 years.)
An uncooked chicken costs $10 to $12 at a grocery store, so how does Costco manage to sell ready-to-eat, seasoned rotisserie chickens for $7.99?
Jeff Lyons, a Costco senior vice president, has said the company sells 100 million of them a year. He would not confirm reports that its chickens are a loss leader – sold at cost or less to pull in customers who buy other stuff.
Mercy for Animals, an organization dedicated to ending exploitation of animals for food, says it knows how Costco does it. Its website says the chickens are super-fast grown in “crowded, filthy barns.”
The organization did some undercover videoing at a new $450 million Costco chicken facility in Nebraska which produces two million birds a week.
It said it found thousands of chickens crowded together, living for weeks in piles of their own feces.
“Chickens struggling to walk under their own unnatural weight. Bodies burned bare from ammonia-laden litter. Dead days-old chicks. Piles of rotting birds. This is Costco Chicken.”
The chickens are force fed to produce the plump breasts favoured by consumers. Their legs often can’t support the unnatural weight gains and birds topple over and end up lying in the poop. The poop contains ammonia which Mercy says burns the birds left to lie in it.
 Some weaker and smaller birds, particularly chicks, are trampled and crushed, and left to rot.
 Costco says it has an animal welfare task force that audits its animal facilities and follows the Five Freedoms of animal well-being – freedom from fear, freedom from discomfort, freedom from thirst and hunger, freedom to exhibit natural behaviour and freedom from pain and suffering.
Costco and other companies do take steps to ease the suffering of animals killed for food. For instance, Costco in its Nebraska facility puts chickens to sleep with carbon dioxide before they are plunged into boiling water to loosen their feathers, thus preventing the birds from being boiled alive.
Philosophical arguments supporting killing animals for food have been around forever. Like, non-human animals don’t think, don’t have souls, and don’t act morally. They are far below us and here solely for our benefit.
 There always have been people who don’t accept those arguments, but they have had little impact on the food industry. A majority of people want meat to eat and meat production provides many jobs and economic benefits.
These days more people are objecting by going vegan. They have stopped eating meat, or eat only meats from animals they know have been treated humanely.
No matter what food companies say or do, animals destined for our dinner plates are not going to live in the comfortable styles we afford our pet cats and dogs. People have been demanding meat to eat for centuries and crowding animals into tight spaces for butchering has been accepted as part of the process.
 It’s a controversial, complicated subject and one for better brains than mine to figure out.
Will I buy and eat another Costco rotisserie chicken? I don’t know. Probably.
What I definitely do know is that all living things, animals, plants or insects, are equally important parts of nature that deserve and must be treated with respect.
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So here we are, one year later. Who would have thought that in an age when contagions are quickly spotted and quickly dealt with that COVID-19 would still be with us, more deadly dangerous than when it first arrived?

More than 109 million cases worldwide and 2.4 million deaths. Canada still experiences roughly 3,200 new cases every day and has had 21,200 reported deaths.

Beyond the actual sickness and death, COVID-19’s toll has been horrifying. Economies devastated, small businesses dying, health care systems exhausted and hundreds of thousands of personal lives shattered.

Millions of people not touched directly by the disease have had their lives changed dramatically.

There is no end in sight. Some experts say that after the pandemic is beaten back COVID-19 will be endemic – a disease that stays around requiring constant vigilance and vaccine updating. Much like polio, whooping cough and other diseases that are controlled but still erupt from time to time.

An important question now is what life will be like after the COVID-19 pandemic finally is subdued. Certainly, it will not simply return to what it was before the pandemic.

Social distancing policies designed to contain COVID-19 already have changed the world of work. Companies are finding that they operate reasonably well without large, costly offices.

However, more people working from home widen gaps in society. Humans are social animals who need to interact with others, and the gaps created by working apart will have to be addressed.

Workplace and work habit changes brought by COVID-19 come on top of changes already occurring. Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence have brought dramatic and stressful changes and will bring many more.

Similarly, the future of education as we knew it is in doubt. Almost 200 governments around the world closed schools during the pandemic. Tens of millions of learners were sent home to continue their learning remotely.
This has led to a huge number of drop outs, creating more less-educated people seeking work in shrinking work places.

It also raises the question of whether remote learning will increase in an attempt to save costs.

All this is creating uncertainty and anxiety. Our sense of safety and certainty about the future and our jobs and lives in general is being shaken badly.

My biggest worry is what COVID-19 is doing, and what it already has done, to our moral instincts.

When a society malfunctions, moral instincts begin to dissolve. We see this already. Tired and stressed, people have become nastier. Crime is up. Disputes are rising in once stable relationships and friendships.

The BBC reported recently that British divorce rates are soaring with one leading law firm reporting a 122-per-cent increase in inquiries between last July and October. Similar increases are being reported in the United States and China.

Sweden reported a 15-per-cent increase in joint divorce filings last summer.
Many jurisdictions around the world report increases in domestic violence during the pandemic. Close to home, Simcoe County shelters are reporting increases of 40 to 50 per cent in crisis line calls.

Post-pandemic life will be different and will require answers to questions about how to adjust to the changes.

Interestingly, some wise thinking about life after illness has been around for almost 400 years, provided by a British cleric named John Donne. After almost dying from an unknown fever in 1623, Donne wrote Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions in which he reflected upon death and human need.

Meditation XVII of Devotions contained two famous thoughts: “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
The first expresses his belief that no one is self-sufficient and everyone must rely on others to achieve a safe and productive life.

The second is the concept that one person’s death diminishes us all because we are a community of human life, not simply individuals removed from what is happening in other places.

Donne’s concepts never really had huge impact on the way we live, probably because they were written in Old English during the middle ages.

They are worth thinking about now in a society that too often puts individualism ahead of working together to achieve a better world.

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The paw prints in the snow make me sad.

They go in a straight line, heading nowhere in particular, yet seemingly heading everywhere.

They enter a hilltop copse of young maples, then descend into a small clearing at the edge of a dense spruce bog. The stride of the track shortens, indicating a pause to reconnoiter, then carries on into the dark thickness.

I have no intention of following. It is hard work walking through the snow and the farther I follow the tracks the sadder I become.

I’m saddened because the tracks are those of a red fox, probably a vixen searching for food the night before. The tracks hold no evidence that she has found any.

I’ve seen the vixen from a distance on a couple of occasions this winter and she looks gaunt from hunger. Following her tracks in the snow tells me how far she has to travel, consuming precious energy, just to find a morsel.
I feel sorry for her but suppress the urge to leave food out for her. Feeding the fox could make her dependent on handouts and diminish her desire to hunt on her own.

And looking hungry does not mean a fox is starving. It might have an empty, growling stomach but that likely will not last for long.
Foxes typically eat 0.5 to one kilogram of food a day. They are superbly equipped to find and catch it.

They have an acute sense of hearing and smell. Researchers have observed foxes detecting an egg 50 centimeters (almost two feet) away and buried under three centimeters (roughly one inch) of sand.

Also, foxes are omnivores and therefore have a wide choice of foods. They’ll eat mice, worms, insect larvae, grubs, carrion, and plant material, especially fruits.

Their hunting skills are legendary and are backed by extreme cunning and some science.  

New Scientist magazine reported some years back that foxes use earth’s magnetic field to hunt. Some other creatures – birds and sharks – also have a ‘magnetic sense’ but foxes are the only critters known to use that sense for catching prey.

The magazine reported that the fox sees earth’s magnetic field as a ring of shadow. The shadow darkens as a fox’s eyes look toward magnetic north.

The fox can hear a mouse moving under a metre of snow but does not know precisely how far away it is. However, as the shadow on the fox’s eyes lines up with the sound of the mouse, they tell the fox the exact location and it pounces through the snow, pinning the mouse with its paws.

Cunning is another large part of keeping the fox from starvation. It’s an imaginative type of cunning that allows the fox to solve a problem when trying to catch prey.

There is the famous story, apparently based on truthful observation, of a fox bringing a stick to the edge of a pond where ducks are swimming. The fox plays with the stick, tossing it about in full view of the ducks who become curious about its behaviour.

The fox tires of its game, drops the stick by the shore and wanders off into some reeds. The ducks are curious and come ashore to check out the stick. Then, zap! The fox jumps up out from the reeds and grabs a duck.

There is another story of a Canadian biologist watching a fox charging a feeding squirrel which escapes by running into its tunnel entrance. Not long after, the squirrel emerges from the tunnel’s exit hole nearby, resumes feeding but is charged again by the fox. It again escapes by running back into the tunnel entrance.

This happens three times but when the squirrel escapes back into the entrance tunnel the fox goes instead to the exit tunnel, waits with its mouth open and grabs the squirrel as it comes out to resume feeding.

When I think about all the skills, tools and cunning a fox has for getting food I feel less sad.

Still, those paw prints trailing endlessly through the snow make me appreciate how long and hard that vixen works to keep food in her belly, and the bellies of any family she might have back in her den.

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 The differences between being religious and being spiritual were never more evident than what’s been happening at Trinity Bible Chapel in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

The church has held three inside Sunday services in defiance of Covid-19, Ontario law and a court order. Its leaders say that banning large inside gatherings during the pandemic is against the right to practice religion. Attending church is an essential service, they say.

So, protecting the right to attend church is more important than protecting the health of your fellow citizens. Which is fine if the Trinity Bible Chapel church-goers, most of them unmasked and not socially distanced in three recent indoors services, stayed inside for next six months instead of going out into the community, heightening the risk of spreading Covid-19.

The church asserts on its website that restrictions on religious gatherings during a pandemic are an infringement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Pastor Jacob Reaume has said people fear Covid-19 because they don’t know “the love of Christ” who already has defeated death,

“The worst thing that can happen to me is that I die and go to heaven,” the Kitchener-Waterloo Record reported him telling an outdoor drive-in service this past Sunday.

Supporting Trinity Chapel is maverick politician Randy Hillier, a civil disobedience advocate banished from the Ontario Progressive Conservative caucus. He attended a January 24 Trinity Bible Chapel service and proudly tweeted about it.

He posted a photo showing dozens of unmasked people in the pews and commented that it was “a wonderful service this morning in Waterloo. it was a top shelf day.” 

The selfishness of the Trinity Bible Chapel folks is more sad and more alarming to me because of a special anniversary this week.

This week marks the 78th anniversary of The Four Chaplains who went down with the U.S. troop ship Dorchester, torpedoed and sank by the German navy off Newfoundland, Feb. 3. 1943.

The chaplains, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, a Methodist minister and a Dutch Reformed minister, gave their life jackets to soldiers who did not have them, then joined arms, prayed and sang hymns as the ship sank. 

Their deaths were not acts of religion. They were acts of spiritualism.

Religion is belief and worship. Basic religion is about looking after yourself faithfully to gain God’s reward. Spiritualism is about looking after others.

Spiritualism is meaningful because its first priority is loving and caring about other people, all living things and the planet itself. It does not require being inside a religious building to understand and practice it.

The first people of North America understood this long before the rest of us arrived. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) creation story exemplifies the giving nature of spiritualism.

It tells of people who lived in the sky above the clouds because there was no earth below, just water. A hole appeared in the clouds and a young lady named Sky Woman fell through it, clutching a handful of seeds as she plunged downward.

Her fall was cushioned by water animals, who helped her onto the back of a giant turtle. Then a muskrat dived to the ocean floor and returned with a handful of mud, which Sky Woman spread on the turtle’s back and saw it grow into our planet.

The muskrat gave its life getting that handful of mud. Its dive to the ocean floor was so deep that when it returned to the surface, it tossed up the mud then, exhausted and out of oxygen, sank and drowned.

Sky Woman spread her seeds across the mud, then offered the fruits of her plantings to all creatures.

Both the Iroquois story of Sky Woman, and the heroism of The Four Chaplains are about giving and looking after each other. They are stories that should be told at Trinity Bible Chapel, and other churches serving extreme right wing religious groups.

How these people can defy Ontario law and pooh-pooh the health of their fellow beings is beyond my comprehension. Especially this week, the anniversary of The Four Chaplains.

And, especially because one of those chaplains – the Dutch Reformed minister – was the Rev. Clark Poling, my dad’s distant cousin, who was the last of a line of seven unbroken generations of seven Poling evangelical ministers.

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