Free Range Chickens (standard:Satire, 3163 words)
Author: freerangemike	Added: Sep 23 2005	Views/Reads: 5166/2637	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A free standing if not free range excerpt from my book. A gang of chickens, mercilously plundering and fighting and being consumed. Actually, the chickens are just a sideshow for the political manueverings of a bunch of political manueverers, but aren't

Back in the age of Homo Wearsfurus, unevolved and primitive men raised
chickens for the sole purpose of eating them.  Some bright cavewoman 
realized it was far more difficult to eat chickens if you couldn't find 
them.  She reasoned that chickens were too dumb to stay put unless they 
were kept in little chicken prisons which would quash the migratory 
instincts of these playful birds.  Thus began the reign of Homo 
Chickenrancherus Maximus, as man began imprisoning these innocent and 
naïve creatures in constrictive pens. 

We all know that Mother Nature ensures that no predator is allowed to
reign unchecked for too long, so Homo Vegetabilia Liberalis soon 
evolved to fight against Chickenrancherus Maximus.  Closely related to 
Homo Arborum Huggerus, Vegetabilia Liberalis found sustainment not in 
eating meat, but rather in protesting.  Vegetabilia Liberalis took 
great offense to the oppression of unenlightened animals by so-called 
enlightened people.  Womankind has come so far in the past twelve to 
two-thousand years.  We've discovered electricity and simple machines 
and Tivo.  We've put people on the moon and found countless ways of 
polluting our planet in new and exciting methods.  Surely, a race so 
capable of advancement and gluttony would rise above the oppression of 
so-called lesser creatures.  Chickens should be free.  Free from pens, 
free from injustice, free from persecution, free from Peter, Paul, and 
Mary hammer songs.  It was time to take action.  And action must beget 
words, for action to Vegetabilia Liberalis implied protesting.  Their 
plan of attack followed the protester's handbook: 1. Support other 
protesters so that they support you; 2. Write letters to Congress 
persons, who ignore you until you send money; and 3. Do your best to 
present your point of view to normal people, which in turn makes normal 
people feel guilty, which makes them not want to feel guilty, which 
makes them not want to see you, and hence makes the probability that 
they dismiss anything you say just as likely as the probability they 
would have continued to ignore the issue had you never come along.  And 
so stagnation eerily foreshadowed the rest of the events in this 
chapter. 

Until a nilatiR-hyped up kid entered the chapter, to bring the
foreshadowed stagnation to fruition.  It seems the precocious child 
sent Homo Vegetabilia Liberalis a copy of Yertle the Turtle to help 
further their cause. 

"And the turtles, of course, all the turtles are free, as turtles, and
maybe all creatures should be," wrote Theodore Geisel. 

This passage should have been just the thing to win support for
Liberalis, but instead, it was just the thing to distract Liberalis.  
After reading the passage, Liberalis concluded that before they could 
fight for the freeing of chickens, they had to make sure turtles were 
free.  It seems Liberalis, like everyone else in this bored-inspired 
story, was far too dumb to understand the genius of Dr Suess, and they 
soon took up the rights of free range turtles.  It turns out 
Chickenrancherus Maximus wasn't the smartest cookie in the jar either.  
Seeing Liberalis suddenly fighting for free range turtles scared 
Maximus.  Borrowing from the United States Cold War strategy, they 
figured that in order to protect their oppression of the chickens, they 
must defend the oppression of the turtles, but couldn't justify a 
reason as to why turtles should be kept in chicken pens.  They feared 
their whole way of life would soon come to an end. 

One of the desperate ranchers called a tobacco lobbyist for advice.  The
next week, the ranchers released a statement defending their use of 
pens.  "Chicken pens are necessary to protect these poor defenseless 
chickens from evil coyotes and Oklahoma Irish Setters.  And they are 
not addictive." 

This strategy only fooled Vegetabilia Liberalis for a few years, after
which they realized that the constrictive pens did not protect the 
chickens from coyotes or Oklahoma Irish Setters (though they had to 
agree that chicken pens were not addictive).  They were tipped off by 
the ranchers' complaints that coyotes and Irish Setters were eating all 
of their chickens.  With this revelation, Liberalis was back on the 
chicken offensive, to which Maximus could only respond through circular 
logic and hollow-point bullets. 

The ranchers began to exterminate the coyotes and Oklahoma Irish Setters
so that Liberalis would no longer be able to claim that coyotes and 


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