An Open Letter to PETA

I hear that you want Colonel Sanders to stop pressure cooking little chickens. As I understand it, your problem is that you feel that chickens have rights, too, and that it is just plain mean to cut them up, bread them and fry them in hot fat.

I can respect your position. I just have one question. What do you want us to do with all those chickens?

It would seem that we only have a couple of choices.

Option 1 would be to simply kill off all of the millions of chickens who are currently imprisoned on farms around the world. I mean, it's not like anyone is going to feed them if they can't sell them to the Colonel, and it would be a shame (not to mention a further violation of whatever rights chickens might have) to let them starve to death. Hence, in the spirit of humanity, we could just whack them all. Of course, we would have to promise not to breed any more of them, in order to break the "cycle of violence". And, chickens would probably become extinct, because I don't think zoo's (except possibly the petting kind) would want them, and there are, to the best of my knowledge, no wild chickens of Borneo running around.

To sum up, Option 1 would leave the rights of chickens intact, but there would be precious few chickens left to enjoy those rights, to whatever extent chickens really enjoy anything. And, we still haven't addressed the issue of what to do with a few hundred million pounds of chicken meat. Could we eat it all in one last frenzied chicken fry (presuming that we have promised never to grow any more) sort of like eating one last doughnut on the way to Jenny Craig?

Option 2 (and this one, on the face of it, seems much more "natural") would be to turn the chickens free. Think about it: millions of chickens enjoying their first taste of freedom after being imprisoned in little cages and being fed on demand for their entire lives. Of course, in the first week or so feral dogs, cats, coyotes and wolves would scarf down about 90% of them. Is that really fair? The aforementioned critters are all omnivorous predators. So is man. It begs the question, "How come the dogs and cats can eat the chickens, and we can't?"

I know, I know, you're going to say that humans know better. Humans, for instance, know that chickens taste better than, say, birch bark. Well, so do all of the other little predatory critters. That's why they want to eat the chickens. That's why we want to eat the chickens. True, dogs and cats and such may not have the capacity to ponder the ethics of eating the chicken but, really, does it matter to the chicken if it is being eaten ethically or unethically? If chickens have the capacity to contemplate life and death, do they go into the void comforted by the fact that they have been consumed by some beast that just doesn't know any better?

The whole ethics thing, quite frankly, has me baffled. As near as I can tell, a domestic chicken has no real purpose except as a food source. I can't imagine that the chicken knows, or cares, whether it is being eaten by a free-spirited wild four-legged carnivore or a bipedal carnivore suffering from angst. If the chicken doesn't care, why do we?

But I digress. Once you figure out where you want the chickens, give me a call, and we'll talk about where to put the cows.