I swung by the cafeteria on my way to the office for a faux-McMuffin.

In the fountain near the entry, a duck and her ducklings splashed around. An earnest young man stood near the fountain, looking at the ducks. He explained himself without me asking.

"The crow was killing one of the ducklings. I had to run it off. It was going to kill it."

I nodded my understanding. I didn't take him to task. If it were my job to educate the world, here's what I would have said: 

"The crow has to eat, too. If it doesn't take the duckling, if it can't find garbage, if it can't eat, it will get hungry. Have you ever been hungry? Really hungry? Brazilian soccer team hungry? And, yeah, everybody loves ducklings, but what if the crow has a nest of chicks somewhere? What if they are screaming for their high-protein regurgitated breakfast?"

What we have, here, is a failure of empathy.

Not sympathy. Your sympathy goes to the duckling. The duckling is the one getting hurt. If you don't feel sympathy for it, what kind of sick piece of work are you? You like watching defenseless animals suffer? Get away from me.

Empathy is understanding people's motives - or a crow's motives, in this case. 

The crow is hungry. It's a simple motive, but one that we can actually share with such a different animal. 

The crow isn't being evil or amoral by attacking the duckling. I'm not even talking about some kind of natural circle-of-life crap. The crow is attacking a member of another species. The mother duck is watching over her young. The crow is not attacking the young of its own species. The crow and the duck are not part of the same community. What we owe other species is different from what we owe our own.

But I didn't tell him these things.

I nodded and went inside and bought a chicken egg and a piece of ham on an English muffin.

I was hungry.