FLAKES: In the chicken house

I like chicken – as a meal, not as a friend. So you can imagine my dismay when I read in the newspaper that town chickens, the type raised in an apartment, are not safe to eat because they are kept in such close quarters that they have to be injected with antibiotics in order to survive.

In some countries you can pay a premium for so-called “organic” chicken. However, the type that I would really be looking for is “chased” chicken. An item of poultry that has the space and the energy to run is probably drug-free. Unfortunately, I am unlikely to get my wish for this kind of labelling fulfilled anytime in the near future.

Recently, I would not have minded being chock-full of antibiotics myself. I was travelling in an aeroplane, destined for a foreign land, when I realised I had caught a bad cold. Now having a cold is unpleasant at the best of times, but when you are among strangers who suspect you of having a very deadly disease which begins with an E, and when you are about to be screened by a machine that shows every trace of fever in your body in glorious technicolour, illness is not funny!

So I sat there swallowing my sneezes and blotting my runny nose while demonstrating that there were absolutely no bloodstains on my handkerchief.

And come to think of it, a plane is very much like the kind of zero-grazing type of chicken-coop where only strong medicines can save the inhabitants from multiple infections. And not a hint of chicken soup to heal my soul! Planes should definitely come with a health warning.

Oracle of wisdom

In the olden days, when one did not feel very well, one would take two aspirins for the fever and go straight to bed. Nowadays, the first place you go to is to the Internet.

Unfortunately, according to this oracle of all wisdom, it appears that the common (and uninspiring) cold has symptoms that are very similar to influenza, the bird flu (the type that jumps from chickens to human beings) and even Ebola. If you don’t have the benefit of a laboratory you just have to wait and see how bad things get! And even more unfortunately, people caught in a plane watching a disease develop don’t have the option to defend themselves by getting off the vehicle!

Anyway, at least there is plenty of reading material up in the air to hide behind. They specialise in those massive newspapers known as broadsheets; one sheet is enough to cover half the body and catch any but the most violent of sneezes. Actually, you don’t read the publication, you wrestle with it. Apart from its impressive size, it breaks up into several sections: business, features, sports, the arts and the magazine.

It was in one of these sections that I discovered that the closest living relative to tyrannosaurus, that scariest of all dinosaurs, is, you guessed it, the chicken! Perhaps this is the eventual solution to feeding a city-full of people with chicken – raise dinosaurs. I imagine that each farms would need to raise only a couple of dinosaurs to meet the demand. I am sure that dinosaurs would have no need for antibiotics and they would taste as good as any well-chased chicken.

And if the IQ of the average dinosaur is in the chicken range, then keeping dinosaurs might just be a manageable task. However, I presume it would no longer be possible to describe cowards as “chicken” or small amounts of money as “chicken feed.” I suppose too that instead of ordering a dozen eggs at the farm, families would order quarter of an egg!

If you want to know why the dinosaur crossed the road, it was because the chicken had not evolved yet! And if you want to know why the chicken crossed the road, it was to get to the other side!

However, all this is moot because, I don’t know whether it was due to the flu or due to antibiotics, but dinosaurs are extinct. Happily, my cold did not evolve into anything worse, so I am not extinct yet! Enjoy a free range chicken this Saturday.