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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Bird brains

I don't know whose chickens are coming home to roost, but he doesn't live in Evansville:

Lafayette's urban chicken debate ended Monday night when a city council committee agreed to leave unchanged an ordinance that bans keeping the birds inside the city.

The meeting pitted those who advocated keeping chickens as pets and laying hens against those who argued that the animals smell bad, devalue neighborhood properties and present health hazards.

More than 80 people attended a meeting devoted to the topic. They included urban chicken advocates Linda Schafer and Matthew Arnett, who came dressed in a feathered, canary yellow chicken suit.

"I love chickens because they're wonderful pets. I love them because they're beautiful and civilized," Schafer said. Beside her, Arnett offered a graceful bow.

I'm tempted to say Schafer is delusional, but there has been too much incivility lately. Let's just surmise that she is unfamiliar with certain rural realities, one of which is, as the second paragraph notes, that chickens smell bad, devalue neighborhood properties and present health habits. They're also dumber than a certain substance that they produce in great quantities. Anybody who wants a chicken as a pet instead of being served crisply fried with mashed potatoes and gravy needs to seek serious counseling.

Comments

Bob G.
Wed, 09/16/2009 - 2:03pm

Leo:
When I was little, Mom got me 2 "chicks" for Easter (yeah, we were weird in Philly back in the early 50s).
After about 6 months, they were getting a tad too large to keep in a row home.
So mom told me "they" had to move to a farm of Dad's buddy in Jersey...and I happily bought into it.
I sure hope they tasted good, because they were well behaved when I had them...
(but not nearly as funny as the two DUCKS I got the following year...that followed ME all over the darn house...ALL the time...LOL)
Nothing like the sound of webbed feet on a linoleum floor in the morning.
Yeah, those weird Philly city-people.

;)

Michael B-P
Wed, 09/16/2009 - 10:28pm

People dressing up in feathered, canary-yellow chicken suits and arguing on behalf of the civility of chickens tends to underscore the fact that intelligence is not a function of how many cerebral neurons remain functional or how many may in fact be capable of reproduction, but rather to what use one is inclined to put the ones which do remain in operation. Dollars to donuts that Schafer and Arnett would be awed by the civility of Tofurkey.

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