Power

Imogen’s final moments on this earth were captured in footage taken by AnimalKIND Qld. It was devastatingly difficult to witness. She had been failed by a system that views her kind as commodities rather than someones. When I first read her story, she was already gone. I felt that familiar, heavy wave of helplessness, that desperate human ache to reach backward through time, to ease her pain and to alter her fate.

We cannot change the past, but as Ken Poirot reminds us, “We can only take action in the present and, therefore, change the future.” And in Imogen’s case, we can only choose what we do with the grief she leaves behind. I realised that while I couldn’t protect her body, nor could her friends, I could lend my voice to her spirit.

It made me think of sliding door moments. The thin, invisible line that separates a life of suffering from a life of sanctuary.

It is the line that defined Edgar Alan Pig. And it is the exact same line that brought dear Polly to me and saved my beloved Ruby and so many more.

Gentle and forgiving Ruby stood on the absolute precipice of human destruction. A gun was loaded for her. Yet her story didn’t end there because a human hand hesitated and a heart pivoted. And in that single, microscopic fracture of a second, a choice was made to lean into kindness instead of violence.

The stark difference between Imogen’s tragedy and the beautiful lives of Edgar, Polly and Ruby does not lie in fate or luck. It rests entirely in the moment of our choice. It rests in human hands and the hearts of those who refuse to look away.

What struck me most about the collective outpouring of emotion to Imogen’s image was the profound, universal recognition of animal sentience. People saw her capacity to suffer, but more than that, they saw the deep empathy of the pigs who returned to her side to offer comfort when humanity would not.

But should have.

Those pigs showed us the purest form of power: the refusal to look away from suffering.

We have the power to turn this world around. We hold the keys to the sliding doors. Every time we choose compassion over convenience, we rewrite the script for millions of unnamed someones just like her.

Though Imogen’s life ended in cruelty, her story must not end in defeat. May it instead ignite a revolution of the heart.

Rest in power, sweet Imogen. We have the watch from here.