Remember the commercial jingle "I feel like chicken tonight?" To Karen Davis, that phrase constitutes hate speech.

Davis is an animal-rights activist, and in her mind the commercial slaughter of chickens is as morally objectionable as the Holocaust. Every year, seven billion broiler chickens lose their lives, and that's just in our own country. To you and me, they may be merely pimply-fleshed, shrink-wrapped blobs in the grocery freezer section. But to Davis, they represent murder most fowl, the slaughter of innocents. And she's devoted her life to stopping the outrage.

Davis, 55, lives in the middle of Holocaust Central--the Delmarva peninsula, Virginia, where half a billion broiler chickens are processed each year. Walk into her house, and you'll be greeted by squawks from feathery creatures named Freda Flower, Star, Dolina, Sarah, and Holly--chickens all. Outside, about a hundred of additional barnyard fowl wander about, many of them rescued by Davis after they fell off trucks headed for death camps (otherwise known as chicken processing plants). Davis is a sort of Florence Nightingale to these fowls, hugging them, kissing them, and chatting with them as she nurses their wounds.

Even for an animal-rights activist, Davis seems extreme. A former university English professor, she now lives alone in a spartan house that offers little in the way of either furniture or comfort. Her husband left her long ago, tiring of his wife's fanatical commitment to something most people think of as a cheap and tasty source of protein. Davis has sacrificed everything--husband, career and comfort--for the sake of chickens. She even skipped her own father's funeral because there was no one to take care of her menagerie while she was gone. Her time is divided between caring for chickens and fighting political battles on their behalf.

What Davis is fighting for is nothing less than a new understanding of life, with no pecking order--no hierarchy of value that places humans at the top and pond scum at the bottom. In her brave new metaphysics of life, chickens are as valuable as you are. And if you disagree--well, you're in denial over your own animal nature.

"Humans have a real problem with being animals," Davis told the Washington Post. Domestic fowl "are so obviously vulnerable and mortal and easy targets, resembling the human condition. One way to avoid having to confront what really brings them to the table," she says, "is to hate the victim."

Davis' psychoanalytical skills really come to the fore in explaining why we eat turkeys on holidays. Turkeys are nothing but scapegoats "for the resentment Americans feel about having to endure terrible traffic to spend a day with the relatives they can't stand."

Stories about college students who engage in strange, animal-linked rituals--such as bowling with frozen turkey carcasses--send her into a towering rage.

Of course Davis has plenty of company in her movement. The college campus is a magnet for animal-rights activists, both students and academics. If you go to Harvard, Georgetown, UCLA or the University or Vermont, you'll even find classes in animal-rights law being taught, arguing that animals should enjoy the same legal rights as humans. (If they’re successful, it’ll be goodbye to zoos, not to mention research labs. An you’d better start learning to like tofu, because we won’t be allowed to "murder" animals anymore.)

Animal-rights advocates don’t always restrict themselves to setting forth their views in classrooms and holding the occasional protest rally. Campus science laboratories are often targets of their ire. In November, activists broke into a Washington State University research center and destroyed research equipment, spray-painted slogans on the walls, smashed computers, and dumped hydrochloric acid on the floors. A few weeks earlier, activists mailed some of the scientists at Harvard University letters booby-trapped with razor blades.

Even more gentle and loving activists can be found in Scotland, where last month, members of the radical Animal Liberation Front kidnapped a television reporter and branded the letters "ALF" onto his back. His crime? Making a documentary film exposing the group's activities.

What is it that drives people to such harsh extremes, or even to devoting 15 years of one's life to chicken-sitting, as Karen Davis has done? Seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal suggests an answer. Pascal taught that there is a God-shaped hole in everyone's heart, and if we don't fill it with God, we'll fill it with something else: some cause or ideology that rouses our sense of a higher purpose.

Davis says bluntly that she doesn't believe in God (no good God, she maintains, would let chickens be tortured and killed just so humans can turn them into nuggets for dinner. "If God's not there for them," she says, "I don't care if He's here for anyone.") And that may explain why she has been driven throughout much of her adult life to find a cause, a reason to live (she fought for the rights of baby seals and other creatures before she settled on chickens).

And having rejected belief in God, Davis apparently has adopted the naturalistic credo that all living things are products of the naturalistic trial-and-error mechanism of natural selection; hence all have the same value. There is no higher purpose that places human life on a different moral plane, no superior position that gives us warrant to domesticate animals and use them for food. As Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, puts it, "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." The conclusion is that rats and pigs and dogs should receive the same treatment as boys.

But ironically, Davis' own actions fly in the face of her own naturalistic worldview. For if life is a product of naturalistic evolution, then we are all in the grip of a competitive struggle to survive, where the overriding principle is the survival of the fittest. Humans have clawed their way to the top of the food chain; and if they choose to turn domestic fowl into chicken patties, turkey croquettes, and duck l'orange, why should Davis care?

The fact that she does care, and care passionately, demonstrates that we all have an in-built, God-given desire to have a purpose, to find something meaningful to build our lives around. Davis' willing sacrifice to save chickens from the slaughterhouse exposes the fact that we don't live merely for the sake of survival and passing on our genes. We're not just purposeless souls waiting for the sun to go out. We're driven by purposes larger than we are.

If we fail to give our hearts and souls to something that is genuinely larger, we will end up twisting that drive into something silly, like becoming a fanatic for chickens' rights.

Not that Christians should be hard-hearted on the issue of animal welfare. After all, Genesis tells us God intended humans to exercise stewardship over the natural world. And through the centuries, many Christians have fought against cruelty to animals--people like St. Francis of Assisi and William Wilberforce.

And yes, maybe we should listen more closely when animal-rights activists tell us about the cruel treatment of animals in labs, on farms, and in zoos. But we should also be aware of the way the God-shaped hole becomes distorted in the hearts of those who are willing to torture and even kill human beings whom they consider animal abusers.

Davis' fanatical concern for feathered victims makes her an almost irresistible target--indeed, when I read the Washington Post story about her out loud to my kids over breakfast they laughed so hard they spit out their corn flakes. But I have to admit that her lifestyle is a rebuke to Christians--not because we enjoy gnawing on the occasional drumstick, but because she makes our own commitments seem so, well, chicken-hearted.

Many of us do little to compare with this woman's devotion. She puts Christians to shame for our own lack of self-sacrifice. She's willing to be a fool for chickens--and yet we're not willing to become fools for Christ, as the Apostle Paul demands. Are we willing to emulate her sacrifice, her total devotion to her cause, in our own sphere?

Before we laugh too hard at someone who's turned her house into a giant chicken coop, we ought to remember the words to a song by the late Keith Green, which applies to all too many Christians: "Jesus rose from the dead, and you--you can't even get out of bed."

One way to make a sacrifice of your own might be to invest a little time in talking with animal-rights advocates who cross your path. If you have a roommate who fantasizes about breaking into zoo to free orangutans or into the science lab to rescue rabbits--if he tries to get Burger King to serve veggie-burgers instead of Big Whoppers--help him to understand the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the animal-rights movement. There is, after all, a big difference between caring about animals--and putting them on the same level as the men, women, and children our Lord died for.