HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2016-07-21, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2016. PAGE 5.
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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.