Uncle Guido Loves Chicken Without Guilt

An article in today’s (3.10) New York Times talks about chickens, animal rights, and ersatz chickens, and of course puts its usual Liberal, Eastern Establishment, crypto-Commie slant on things: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/finally-fake-chicken-worth-eating.html?ref=opinion

IT is pretty well established that animals are capable of suffering; we’ve come a long way since Descartes famously compared them to nonfeeling machines put on earth to serve man. (Rousseau later countered this, saying that animals shared “some measure” of human nature and should partake of “natural right.”) No matter where you stand on this spectrum, you probably agree that it’s a noble goal to reduce the level of the suffering of animals raised for meat in industrial conditions.

This is patently absurd.  While pigs might suffer a bit -studies have tried to show that pigs have a high intelligence, and if they could talk we could converse with them – there is no way that a chicken could suffer because they are too stupid.  Pain, although originating in the cerebellum of human beings, a pre-cognitive part of the brain, it still takes the cognitive part to be able to realize hurt and to scream “Ouch”.  Not chickens.  If they have a cerebellum (we know that they have none of the higher brain elements), then maybe there might be some additional twitching and prancing, but they have no idea why they are doing it.  So, Mr. New York Times, get your facts straight.

OK, not get this for some twisted remedies:

There are four ways to move toward fixing this. One, we can improve the animals’ living conditions; two (this is distasteful but would shock no one), we might see producers reduce or even eliminate animals’ consciousness, say, by removing the cerebral cortex, in effect converting them to a kind of vegetable (see Margaret Atwood’s horrifying description in her prescient “Oryx and Crake”; three, we can consume fewer industrially raised animals, concentrating on those raised more humanely.

A chicken has no ‘consciousness’ because it has no cerebral cortex! And even if it did, it would operate differently from other animals.  How do you think got the Herzog chicken to dance anyway? I mean, doesn’t it take ‘intelligence’ to learn how to do something?  No, obviously.  There were little hot wires in the floor of the cage that sparked to the music.  http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cts=1331382512396&ved=0CCwQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DIcoqeNdMAfA&ei=70hbT4qyLeGq2QWL2eHlDg&usg=AFQjCNHXn4Bgmy68jdLDomniZ-isIT1dcw

Now to the crux of the article – fake chicken:

But in October I visited a place in The Hague called The Vegetarian Butcher, where the “butcher” said to me, “We slaughter soy” — ha-ha. The plant-based products were actually pretty good — the chicken would have fooled me if I hadn’t known what it was — and I began to consider that it might be better to eat fake meat that harms no animals and causes less environmental damage than meat raised industrially.

This reporter and the soy slaughterer are both way out of date.  They are talking about slices of chicken, fake tofu chicken breasts; but there have been successful Hungarian experiments to create an entirely fake chickens – whole, feathered things that have been produced out of recombinant DNA and a super space-age polymer.  They have for some reason not been able to just produce the Purdue-style broilers you find in the supermarket, so these fake, brainless (of course when the scientists recombined the left out the totally useless brain) chickens come fully feathered, coxcombed, ready to crow, except they are inert and you have to prop them up.

You find this hard to believe?  With all the Obama conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet (not only was he not born in the United States, he was born on another planet.  Wherever he was born there was too much fluoride in the water, which makes him especially susceptible to Muslim, Socialist creeds.  Or the aliens from another planet bored into him like hookworms and infested him with the communist, socialist, radical Muslim philosophy of their planet) this relatively tame one about recombinant chickens is perfectly rational. 

As an aside, there is only one of these viral screeds I pay any attention to – Obama’s last reincarnation was a chicken, which is why he is so stupid.  Now I don’t think he’s so stupid, very smart in fact; and in my opinion all of the Republican candidates not only were chickens, they are chickens, at least the brain or lack thereof part, and they have no chance against Our President in the Fall.

Now, get this:

Indeed. This country goes through a lot of chickens: We raise and kill nearly eight billion a year — about 40 percent of our meat consumption, compared with roughly 30 percent beef and 25 percent pork. Chickens are grown so quickly that The Veterinary Record has said that most have bone disease, and many live in chronic pain. (The University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as chickens, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.)

Once again, the Commie-Socialist-Muslim-Atheist New York Times has totally, irretrievably missed the point.  We as Americans should be proud of those chickens!! Dumb-ass, brainless, totally worthless animals (If I were a Believer, I would have said that God created them reluctantly, never loved them at all, but figured humans would eventually need them for food), but prodigious producers.  Look at our economy, for God’s sake.  The debt, the deficit, joblessness, all caused by the above-mentioned former chicken or alien-invaded Obama. We talk about lack of productivity, lassitude in the workforce.  Look to the chickens.  Three hundred and forty nine pounds before my second birthday.

My friends, the reporter is not finished:

I don’t believe chickens have souls, but it’s obvious they have real lives, consciousness and feeling, and they’re capable of suffering, so any reduction in the number killed each year would be good.

“Don’t have souls”?! What a dope! How did he get a job for the NY Times.  I used to read it as The Paper of Record, a beacon of rationality, good judgment, reason and moderation in these days of Webslime and clucking invective.  No more.  He finally – he’s probably 50 – realizes that chickens don’t have souls.  Duh.  Forget about God’s role in giving things souls (I mean you can’t manufacture souls in Hungary), even if you had a soul you would need some kind of brain power to do something with it.  Come on!

This dope closes with the following:

And almost all unbiased people agree that less meat is better than more: for our health, for the environment and certainly for the animals treated as widgets.

Widgets? There he goes again.  Widgets – whatever they are (the term is generic for “You name it” – have to be smarter, more sensitive, more feeling, more soulful, more worthy than chickens.  Chickens, if they had a brain to realize it, should be happy to be compared to widgets.

OK, enough said on the subject. I’m tired out.