The mood at the moment is:
Neat website(s) of the day:AvatarSearch...and some sites that I found for the Maidens list that I forgot to bookmark. Sheesh. I guess I'll just have to wait until I download that email ~ it's not in the sent file for some reason.
I guess Kokopelli was listening ~ it hasn't been nearly as bad as it was yesterday. It's been nearly tolerable. Nearly.
I watched an interesting show tonight called The Natural History of the Chicken. It was pretty good ~ they even included Mike. Mike made the side show circuit back in the 1940's after his owner decided to keep him...after an attempt to make him dinner failed. It was a slightly disgusting sight to see the old pictures. You know, the last place one really likes to look is down a beheaded chicken's throat.
It was also one of those shows that got me to thinking (Ut oh). It showed three chicken 'factories' ~ one specifically to hatch fertilized eggs; one to grow those chicks to market weight and another specifically for egg production. I think I will stop eating chicken and eggs from the store. That was entirely debasing. When the chicks hatch and are a day old, they are loaded up; vaccinated by jamming them onto a stationary syringe (one that is repeatedly used, over and over), and tossing them down a shute where they ride a conveyor belt to who knows where ~ presumably to be crated for their trip to the growth farm. There, the chicks are jammed into a barn where they barely have room to stand as they grow. The 'egg factories' are just as bad. The hens are jammed 5,6 to a cage where they don't even have room to spread their wings. Once the eggs are laid, they slip through the floor to another conveyor belt on its way to be packaged and carried to the store.
There is just something wrong when living beings are treated as 'product' and are cranked out like Hondas. Don't get me wrong ~ eggs are good. Chicken is good. But is it good to deny basic needs in order to supply demand? I don't think so and I don't want to participate in it anymore. I think I will see if anyone up in the Mennonite settlement sells eggs or free range chicken. I think I remember someone doing that last year. There, the chickens have ordinary farm lives.
I don't know if I could kill one to eat or not. I may just have to have someone else do that for me or give up eating chicken altogether. I guess if times were bad enough, I could do it.
Watching this show also reminded me of how much I would like having a few chickens in the yard. I think I would have to have at least one Silver Sebright ~ they're the ones that look as if they're made of stained glass, with the white feathers outlined in black. Those are some totally cool chickens. Of course, I'd have to figure something out ~ I don't think that cats and chickens will mix very well. Still, it would be very neat to gather my own eggs.
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