David Horsey goes to the birds…

Good morning, Netizens…

In case you were trying to read the Spokesman this morning online, it has been notably offline since about 8:45 AM or thereabouts, but has recently returned to the forefront. FreeBSD-Python can do that to you, as several in my little community have noted.

But in the meantime, our scientists have been discovering that eating lots of red meat is probably bad for your health and may cause you to die earlier in life. Always on the lookout for new ways to help the unemployed/under-employed, this morning the Seattle-PI’s David Horsey has taken on the cause of the American Cowboy and chickens with some unpredictable results.

First, I should mention that, as a young man, which as everyone knows was nearly eons ago, I once helped my Aunt Beryl raise a few hundred head of chickens, which had a traumatic effect on the rest of my life. They have got to be the dumbest creatures ever set forth on this planet by the Chicken God. At a ripe young age, I learned how to capture a chicken, using a piece of stiff six gauge wire bent into a loop. The idea was that you sneak up behind the chicken, remembering what I just said about chickens earlier, so you don’t have to waste all that effort being stealthy.

Reach out with your loop of wire and snag the chicken’s leg, and you’ve captured the faint-hearted critter. The cowboys in Horsey’s cartoon have it all wrong. You don’t need to rope and brand a chicken.Just grab them by a leg and they are yours.

Once Aunt Beryl taught me how to capture chickens, it was a short run from there to the beheading pen, surrounded top and all four sides with chicken wire, adjacent to the chicken house and thus convenient for those moments when you wanted to part a chicken from its life. In the center of the pen there was an old ax that had outlived wood cutting and had become the chicken beheading unit. WHOCK! Behead that bird and then dump it on the ground. It takes the average chicken about three minutes to die, during which time it will flail and dash madly from side to side in ecstasy in the beheading pen, until it finally dies of having no head and and no more blood.

After awhile, you can go around and pick up the dead chicken, and if all went well, it would be what you had for dinner. Sometime perhaps I’ll tell you about butchering dead chickens, if you persist. If anything else, that might convince most of you to stick with eating beef.

Dave