Save the Chicks!

(This post is a direct reply to Anupama’s post here. I am forced to write this because the blogger has enabled moderation of comments and publishes only the ones which agrees with her post)

I just like this blogger who goes by the name Anupama for always coming up with creative challenges in her posts which evokes a non agreement stand from my side. Having said that lets us analyze why a sparrow is loved more than a chicken. Chicken is a bird too so is duck. Wait a minute! They are soo tasty aren’t they? Yup! The same ones. Why are they not loved as birds and more loved as roast or grilled. Needless to say I firmly believe that maybe the blogger and those who commented on Anupama’s post may never have eaten a bird in any form but I am sure that at least they have witnessed willingly or unwillingly a chicken taking its last breath to decorate someone’s dining table at some point in their life. In fact there are more chicken in the world than all the birds combined. If what is shown in this documentary is to be believed then some are even born and die without ever seeing the light. Why do people go ga ga over one bird and refuse to see the plight of another? May be its human nature to see what we want to see or hear and sideline the other issues which is in direct conflict with our existence. Maybe it’s because a fried sparrow is awful when compared to a fried chicken. If we don’t discriminate chicken and don’t see the chicken steak instead of their over fed obese body which happen to have a pair of sad (put me out of my misery look) eyes, then how can we eat them.

Chicken makes beautiful sounds too; I believe they are indeed a match for the cacophony that these sparrows make. It was always fun to watch how a traditional chicken (not the factory produced broiler ones) raises its young ones and one thing I have great respect is the way the mother chases the kids away once they have reached a certain age to find their own version of the truth. She chases them away to realize their own potential unlike us humans. We like to keep our children close and under our own rule and command no matter what age they are. We humans unlike chickens insist that they should turn out the way we want them to be. Ain’t the chickens having a more liberal society than ours?

I say damn those NGOs. How come they don’t see the case of a sad, oppressed and suppressed chicken? The chicks need a day of their own for enduring the pain of their own over grown bodies on their weak legs, for just being born for us to bite on that breast, for lining up without a fight to be slaughtered. Let’s remember, all the chickens we ate collectively and the one we are going to fry in our collective ovens in the future, on that day.

Moral of the Post: Treat a bird as what it is, a frigging bird, otherwise respect all birds irrespective of their nature and how they taste when cooked. I am reminded of a line from George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ – “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"