Finding Faith

Psychologists and behaviourists and 
those wise in the ways of the 
emerging persona baffled by those
famed raging hormones label it
sublimation, a focus transferred from
the confusing carnal animal inheritance
of the human animal to the passion
and emotion of hypocrisy revealed in
the aggregate of social custom and the
conceit of species superiority. Voice
vibrating with the intensity of 
outraged indignation the girl verging
on womanhood rails against the unjust
treatment of non-human animals. She
sheds tear of anguish when her peers
corner a frightened mouse in their
classroom to triumph in its casual dispatch,
amusing others no end at her sympathy
for the tiny creature. She composes a
sternly unforgiving essay on the right
to dignity and fair treatment of 
animals destined for slaughter, a topic
scorned in her rural community. 
Reasoning her classmates should care
if animal husbandry and the livestock
industry use methods of housing and
inoculation of pathogens that will
inevitably pollute the water table and
infiltrate human bodily health, she is the
converted, preaching to the heathen, 
alone and alienated in her faith. And yes,
of course, she has transformed herself,
an absolute vegetarian, shunning gore.