I am haunted by an image on a nature program–a young zebra stallion savages a newborn foal to death because the foal was fathered by a predecessor.

We turned the television off, but not before the narrator states that the foal’s “ordeal is over” and will not survive the attack.

I understand the rules of natural videography: don’t obstruct the narrative. I just believe it is time we change the rules for animals and men.

I have little doubt that the film crew could have saved the foal and found a place for it in sanctuary. They simple did not.

We simply do not as well. We avoid conflict with humans even when it is their own children they savage to death.

Abortion is an extreme form of child abuse. Yet we treat it with temerity, speaking gently of “a woman’s right to choose.”

Some choices are unacceptable: cruel, inhumane, deadly.

It would have been humane and appropriate for the men who watched the foal die to intervene on its behalf. They did not because they wanted the narrative, because the paradigm has not been sufficiently challenged.

Time to challenge it.

If we stand by and watch children, anyone be savaged, victimized, or harmed by another and do not intervene, we are culpable.

If we stay quiet in the face of injustice, then we must own this narrative. The crime belongs to all of us unless we are willing to speak up, intervene, challenge the paradigm for our dead and missing children.