Dangerous Urban Chicken Craze Has Legs
What's next -- clean air?
By SARA K. SMITH
Updated 5:38 PM PDT, Wed, Aug 19, 2009
After all the factory farming industry has done for us, it's shameful that people can't show a little more gratitude. Thanks to massive industrial complexes where cows, chickens, and pigs spend their artificially short lives in dire confinement, ankle deep in their own poo and kept alive on a diet of corn syrup and trash, we have regular access to affordable meats and eggs that are very nearly edible most of the time!
And how do consumers say thank you to these brave souls? They start growing their own chickens. And eggs. In their own backyards.
A number of American cities have already jumped on the "urban chicken" movement, with residents turning their once-scenic and fragrant yards into pestilent dens of stinking guano. Such unreconstructed hippies love to play the modern homesteader, gathering eggs every morning and baling out their coops on weekends.
The latest such Farmer Joes: two women, Gay-Ellen Stulp and Stephany Miskunas, who are trying to get backyard chickens legalized in their Lafayette, Indiana neighborhood.
It's been a blast," Stulp said of her quest. "I can't believe the discussions I've gotten as I go around with my petition.
"It's a little hobby. They are pets. I guess I'm now part of the chicken underground."
Sure, they're pets to you, lady! But to the children of men and women who run and work at the massive egg farms that produce cheap, brittle-shelled, anemic, watery eggs for the rest of us, these chickens are nothing less than a threat to their very way of life.
Plus, if there's one thing this healthcare debate has taught us, it's how terrifically un-American it is to introduce cheap not-for-profit competitors to large, profit-driven companies that have employees and taxes to pay. In other words, the private coop is just one slippery slope away from the private co-op.
So let's hope this dangerous "urban chicken" trend doesn't spread any further. Because if it does, the next thing you know people will be growing their own vegetables to go with their eggs.
And that way lies socialism.
Sara K. Smith can butcher a chicken but she still doesn't know what body part the McNugget comes from. She writes for NBC and Wonkette.
Copyright NBC Local Media
First Published: Aug 18, 2009 6:16 PM PDT
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