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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2016-07-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2016. PAGE 5. Other Views Rooster not all he's cooked up to be Here is an intriguing item I found pinned on the village bulletin board this morning: "Seeking," the note importunes, "stud rooster service for young, healthy pullets. Orphington Americauna or Rhode Island Red preferred, but let me know what you've got." I'll tell you what I've got, my man. I've got a question for you. The question is: do you have any idea what you're letting yourself in for? Oh, I know. You think you're a connoisseur of poultry just because you've got a few clucketty hens scratching and pecking around your yard. But roosters? They're a different kettle of, er, feathers. I speak as a veritable dean of matters roosterian. Indeed, you will find on my office wall an official document identifying me as COCK OF THE WALK. Nothing to do with blue movies, madame. I earned that title by presiding as Chief Magistrate of the Rooster Crowing Contest at the Salt Spring Fall Fair. It's a function I intend to repeat this year (Sept. 17-18, Island Farmers' Institute. Everyone welcome.) It goes without saying I know a thing or two "4 Arthur Black about Gallus gallus. The most overpowering fact I know about roosters: they're loud. Overpowering fact number two: they're early risers. Those are two very good reasons to re -think any desire to allow one on your property. But why `roosters'? Because `roosting' is what they do second best. They guard their hen harems by finding a vantage point — a roost usually three to five feet above the nesting area. This allows them to keep one eye on the girls and the other peeled for any incoming rooster competition. That is the other thing I know about roosters: they're testosterone -heavy which makes them aggressively territorial. And polygamous. My, are they polygamous. There's a story of a fanner who sent away for a `service rooster'. When the box came from Fed Ex it practically jumped out of the driver's arms. A White Crested Black Poland rooster exploded out of the box and stormed into the farmyard. It swarmed the first hen it came to and ravished it on the spot. Then it leapt on the next one. And the next. Before the afternoon was out the rooster had serviced the entire flock of 36 pullets, some of them twice. Not only that, the barn cat was up a maple tree, Rover was whimpering in his doghouse and even the cattle looked nervous. The farmer finally tracked the rooster down. He found it spread-eagled on the manure pile, feathers disheveled, comb unkempt, tongue hanging out of his beak. Overhead, a flock of vultures was descending in slow-motion rotation. "You fool bird!" the farmer yelled at the carcass. "I paid over a hundred dollars for you and you worked yourself to death in one day! Why, you haven't got the brains of a jackass!" The rooster opened one eye, pointed a bedraggled wing at the nearest circling buzzard and whispered "Shhhh" Blame the user, not the object Are you familiar, faithful readers, with the incredible movement that is Pokemon Go? The augmented reality video game has swept many nations (Canada not included as it hasn't been released officially here yet) and created incredible changes in its wake as it is the first video game to encourage people to get out in the real world and be social. Augmented reality is the opposite of virtual reality, from a video game perspective. Instead of replacing what you see, hear, and, in some advanced scenarios, feel, with some other experience, it takes the world around you and overlays a different one over top. What does that mean? Well imagine a field of grass. Now imagine being able to look at that field through special glasses that would show a football game right in front of you. You get closer to the action by walking around, all without ever actually being where the game is happening. The Pokemon Go game inserts Pokemon (Pocket Monsters) into the real world which you can only see through your camera. The advent of the game has seen people walking, biking and even swimming to remote locations to "catch them all." It has been praised for its ability to encourage people to get active and the way it has created a new social paradigm where people of all ages and from all walks of life are competing, comparing and conversing about the game. While the game can have all these great things attributed to it, there are those who want to blame it for some stupid things people have done with the game. Take, for example, the pre -teen girl who walked into traffic to try and catch a Pokemon, or the two grown men who walked off a cliff while intently staring at their phones. Despite the fact that the game itself warns against this kind of behavior, people want to blame it for the stupidity of some users (kind of like how cell phones are evil because people can't put them down while they are driving). Inanimate objects can bring about positive change, but we can't keep blaming them Denny Scott gills& Denny's Den. for problems that are all too human in nature. This game doesn't make people walk into poles or off cliffs or into traffic. It doesn't force people to do silly things, the only thing it does is give people something to stare at long enough to allow them to do something silly but, again, only if they choose to. Cigarettes, as an analogue, aren't evil. They result in death and disease, but no one forces people to smoke them. As a matter of fact, millions of tax dollars are spent across the globe every year trying to convince people to quit. Cars aren't blamed for car accidents, despite the fact that scores of people every year decide to get into one in an angry, exhausted or inebriated state. We blame the person, not the object. Alcohol doesn't cause violence or divorces or bad decisions. The only thing it does, when people forget their limit, is allow people to act without regard for the consequences. Regardless of what country crooners would lead us to believe, alcohol isn't actually the reason we dance when we shouldn't (or can't) or the reason we think putting a lampshade on our head is a good idea. Keep in mind here I'm thinking only of products that aren't designed to hurt people but were created for some other purpose. Cigarettes weren't originally crafted to cause cancer. Alcohol wasn't first created to cause harm and this new wave of technology was created so that people could get some exercise and have fun. Some things are, of course, exempt from the blanket amnesty of, "Well someone was being stupid." For example, firearms. Firearms, outside of hunting, police and military use, are very rarely misused causing harm. Typically, if someone is shot by a gun, regardless of its type, it's because someone was aiming it at them or aiming it at someone else and missed. Not to blow holes in my own argument here, but some things are designed to hurt and should be treated as such. We need to stop blaming things that weren't designed to hurt however, and blame people for using them in a manner that causes injury. We can't blame a cigarette for causing cancer when someone else chose to smoke a pack a day for years. We can't blame a beverage for breaking a nose, an arm or a marriage. We also have to learn that we can't blame benign technology for the failings of those using it. People walking into traffic or off cliffs while playing a game doesn't show a failing in the technology, but a failing in those people. It's time to stop demonizing things and time to start taking responsibility for the actions of our species as a whole. If someone can't stop looking away from their phone long enough to avoid a significant car accident, we should look at sterner punishments for those who don't lock their phones in the console when they drive. If someone can't impose upon themselves a limit when drinking and ends up hurting someone else, we should hold them responsible and not allow them a reprieve based on the fact that they weren't in their right mind at the time (mainly because they chose not to be). And most importantly, if someone doesn't think far enough ahead to know they will be held responsible for their actions, be it as innocuous as bumping into someone while staring at their phone or as heinous as rape, we can't allow objects or circumstances to bear the blame for the actions (or inaction) of a person. The world needs to stop coddling people by blaming circumstances or objects and start holding people responsible for their failings. Final Thought The old believe everything; the middle- aged suspect everything; the young know everything. — Oscar Wilde Shawn lornialii" Loughlin Shawn's Sense Prepare to be judged bile I am not yet a parent, one of the things I have gleaned from my decades on this planet — especially the later ones — is that parenting is hard. Parenting seems to be one of the more difficult tasks people undertake on a daily basis. The other thing about parenting is that it never ends. A mother or father will always be protective of their son or daughter because that relationship obviously never ceases to exist. While there are definitely some clear dos and don'ts, there is no right way to do things and there is no wrong way. And while I'd like to say that kids don't come with directions — that's not entirely true. Countless books have been written on the subject, but, just like any rulebook, likely the first time you pull it out, you'll notice that your specific situation isn't covered in its pages. Very often you're left to your own devices as to how best to raise your child. And unless you're breaking a law and endangering your children, life has typically followed the path where parents don't judge other parents on how they're doing. No one will ever love a person as much as their parents do, so you can generally believe that parents have their child's best interests at heart. Having said that, in this day and age of the internet and social media, you can't help but be reminded of the old adage about opinions relating them to a certain part of the body below the belt. Why? Because opinions are like this body part — everybody's got one. Kristin Cavallari, an American actress, recently posted a picture to Instagram celebrating Independence Day on a beach with her children. The picture immediately drew criticism from everybody with an iPhone who deemed Cavallari's children to be a little too skinny for their liking. All of a sudden a nice picture celebrating an American holiday became a referendum on whether or not this actress was intentionally starving her children. It wasn't much longer until the parenting police were at it again on Instagram once again when Victoria Beckham, the former Posh Spice of the Spice Girls and wife of famous soccer player David Beckham, posted a picture of her and her daughter. The problem? Beckham was kissing her young daughter on the lips and a lot of people on the internet had a big problem with it. Whether you're famous or not and whether you're raising a child or not, it's a whole new world these days and it seems like everyone is on the edge of their seat waiting to chime in as to whether or not what you're doing and how you did it is how they would have done it. Looking back through baby pictures of the author of this column (me), you might think that maybe I was a little heavier than the average baby. And you'd be right. No rhyme or reason to it, I was just a heavy baby. I eventually shed that baby weight and was bean pole-esque skinny through most of public school and into high school. Perhaps if Instagram existed back then and my mom posted pictures of my every move, she may have been criticized by her friends and maybe even people she didn't know for feeding me too much, forcing food down my throat and essentially killing her child one bite at a time. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? That's because it is. If these comments were coming from a nosy neighbour or someone on the street, you'd tell them to shut up and mind their own business, but on the internes, for some reason, everyone has to chime in.