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Jewish World Review August 3, 2005 / 27 Tammuz, 5765 Chickens and insurgents By Dean P. Johnson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
We hear the question all the time: How can those insurgents kill their own people — women and children, innocent lives — in the name of some cause?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Insurgents are chickens.
The summer between seventh and eighth grade, I spent a week at my cousin's farm. My mother was the youngest of four children and all my cousins were 15 to 20 years older than I.
It was a small farm that had been in my cousin's husband's family for generations in what was once rural southern New Jersey, now on the fringe of Atlantic City's suburban sprawl.
The farm had fields of tomatoes and peppers as well as soybean and corn used as feed for the cows, pigs and chickens. There were also orchards of apples, plums, and peaches, and, scattered about, were several pumpkin patches that, along with a field of corn carved into a maze, made for autumnal fun.
During my week's stay, a "vacation" from my parents and two brothers, I worked along side my cousin's husband, Albert, and several farm hands moving irrigation pipes, feeding the animals and picking tomatoes which were then in peak season.
Another one of my duties was to gather eggs from the henhouse in the mornings. It was simple, Albert explained to me. All I had to do is reach under the chicken to get the eggs. They'll be startled and fly up off the nest making the eggs easily accessible.
I took a large whicker basket and entered the henhouse. It was dark inside, as if illuminated by a black light; it smelled dank and tiny bits of feathery down floated in the air like snowflakes in suspended animation. Milling around my feet were white and brown chickens, a carpet of chickens, pecking at the ground, expecting me to toss them some feed, but that wasn't why I had come.
I found that several of the nests were deserted, so I quickly picked up those eggs first. At my first occupied nest, I hesitated. I was a little nervous about nudging this chicken, which, by the way, looked much larger and quite intimidating close up, off her roost, but Albert had insisted chickens weren't too bright and were easily scared. As I began to reach for the eggs, the hen made a low growl sound and pecked at my hand.
I flinched backward, lost my balance and fell on my rear, spilling the eggs in my basket. A mass of chickens made a mad dash toward me. I screamed and made my way for the door.
So, I slowly opened the door and peered inside. Everything seemed to be back to normal. I stepped in and walked gently to the overturned basket. The chickens didn't seem to take much notice of me. I carefully picked up the basket and the eggs on the ground, trying not to make any sudden moves. Only one egg had broken. I looked at the shell. It appeared to be pulverized, and there was no gooey stuff.
I thought for a moment and then took an egg in my right hand and lobbed it over to the far corner of the coup. The second it smashed on the floor, all the birds flocked to it in a mad rush, leaving their nests open. I began snatching up more eggs, and when the hens started to return, I lobbed another egg causing another rush, giving me enough time to finish gathering the eggs.
Feeling triumphant, I told Albert about my discovery. He became angry, told me to never do that again and explained to me that the chickens will eat their own eggs and if I continued to feed them the eggs, they would eventually learn to peck open their own, obliterating any chance of a future.
Insurgents are chickens.
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JWR contributor Dean P. Johnson's columns appear in Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Hartford Courant, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Francisco Examiner, Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger, Atlantic City Press, Philadelphia Inquirer among other smaller papers. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Dean P. Johnson |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
