Hypothesis: You don't actually care about the penguins any more than you care about the cows. However, you've just read something that was intentionally designe

Hypothesis: You don't actually care about the penguins any more than you care about the cows. However, you've just read something that was intentionally designed to make you feel sad for penguins. If you'd read a piece similarly designed to make you feel bad for cows, you'd have a similar experience. For example, most people have a very negative reaction to slaughterhouse footage and videos of cows being abused by frustrated workers. But in a day or two, you won't care about either. That's not to say what was done to the penguins and what is done to cows isn't truely horrible. Just that human emotional responses to widespread atrocities are surprisingly fleeting, and those emotional responses don't reliabily indicate moral objection and can't be relied upon to bring change.