LETCH – Loonies for the Ethical Treatment of Chickens

PETA, or the People Eating Tasty Animals, has been protesting in town this week.  They are a little upset with a local restaurant for selling chicken.  I’m not exactly sure just what the restaurant did that was wrong, but it apparently has something to do with killing the chicken before selling them as food.  Perhaps, PETA would prefer that your chicken sandwich scream as you bite into it.

PETA seems to be against pretty much everything involving animals except taking them to a happy farm in the country, where the animals can run and play.  The members of PETA are the only people over the age of 10 who still believe in that farm.  Simple beliefs are much easier than thinking; PETA doesn’t want to face a few simple unpleasant facts.

First, there are no happy stories involving chickens.  Trust me: I have a little experience here.  When chickens are the central character, the  stories never ends with the phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.”  No, stories with chickens end with a meal.  No poultry retirement homes, no white meat hospitals, no chicken cemeteries.  The last words said over a chicken are either a recipe or grace.

Secondly, PETA, do you really want to stop people from eating livestock?  Think about it, if no one eats livestock, no one will raise livestock.  Very few people will want to keep cows as pets.  Do you really want to protect whole species until they reach extinction?  This is also true for a lot of pets, even PETA can’t believe in large herds of free-range Chihuahuas.

Wait, come to think of it, PETA doesn’t believe in keeping pets either.  This week they are trying to push through an ordinance in San Francisco that will ban the sale of pets, even goldfish.  If you cannot sell pets, it is probably inhumane to own them.   We should all throw our pets out the front door, right now.  I’m going to start with my wife’s cat.  The useless cross-eyed feline lives under the sofa, so we call him Dust Bunny.  He could be gone for weeks before the Doc misses him, and even then I can blame his absence on PETA.

I have some prior experience with PETA--you might say they have even been to my home.  It started years ago when someone wrote to the local newspaper complaining about a local restaurant.  In particular, the restaurant had served pâté de foie gras, goose liver.  The writer claimed that pâté came from geese that had their feet nailed to the floor while grain was forced into their stomachs.

The restaurant in question was a favorite of mine, and here is part of a letter that I wrote in its defense:

I quite unashamedly like the liver pâté, and I don’t care about the geese who gave their all so I could spread their innards on a cracker.  Are the geese really nailed to floor and force fed?  I don’t know, but I remember a gander my family had when I was a child.  Its name was Knothead, and it used to chase me around the yard biting large red welts on my backside.  This memory leads me to hope that the preparation of pâté calls for the geese to be nailed to the ceiling while their livers are extracted with a power sander.

The paper published my letter.  The local chapter of PETA came to my house picketed briefly, and threw their literature all over the front lawn.