Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
With news of the Iraq war demanding so much space in the paper, I've been unable to share with you important nonwar news, like the story about the two brothers in California who fed 30,000 live chickens into wood chippers. All the news that’s
(barely) fit to printI usually stuff items like the wood chipper chickens story into "AloHa Friday!" But that column was temporarily discontinued after editors commandeered Page 2 for war coverage. So I thought I'd at least share with you this one interesting story from the animal world you might have missed.
Animal rights activists were -- not surprisingly -- upset to find out that live chickens were being fed into wood chippers. They got more upset when they learned that the farmers doing the chicken chipping had actually gotten permission from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for dispatching the poultry in such dramatic fashion and would not be charged with criminal animal cruelty.
According to the wire coverage, the problem was that the chickens were "spent," meaning they couldn't lay eggs anymore. And because the farms were under quarantine for the poultry virus exotic Newscastle disease, they also couldn't be turned into McNuggets or honey-barbecued chicken wings.
NOW, YOU WOULD think that there must be some alternative for chickens when they are no longer any use along the food line, but that apparently is not the case. There are no chicken races or chicken rodeos, and chickens can't float around in Florida waterways like manatees with tourists taking their pictures. Chickens can't be used by police to sniff out drugs or bombs or by organizations for the handicapped, although I think "seeing eye" chickens might work if they stop screaming and panicking every time they see a car coming at them.
And, sadly, there are no retirement farms for "spent" chickens, like there are for "spent" race horses. So the farmers in California decided the most humane thing to do would be to send the birds off to chicken heaven, where the ground is strewn with golden chicken feed and there are few cars to speak of.
How the farmers then made the leap to tossing the live chickens into wood chippers is more problematic. I mean, did they sit down with the Agriculture Department guys and consider various ways of killing chickens using farm implements? Run over them with tractors? No, too time-consuming. Smash them in the butter churn? No, wife won't go for that. Put them through the hay bailer? No, waste of wire. Hey, I got it! Let's put throw them in the wood chipper!
I've got to go with the animal rights people on this one. It's wrong to use a wood chipper for getting rid of live chickens. Now, if you were having a problem with your beaver or woodchuck population around the farm, that might be another matter.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com