Endangered Species...?

Here's a funny thought.

I was eating my breakfast in Chillipeppers the other day when a horrifying notion slipped into my otherwise untroubled brain. I looked around at my fellow diners in the restaurant and I realised that nearly all of them had something in common. You know what it was?

They were nearly all eating chicken!!

Even my dear wife sitting opposite me was tucking into a plate of fried noodles with bits of chicken in it. I was eating a chicken sandwich, and various people around the room were eating chicken in various shapes and forms - fried, steamed, sliced, curried.

That set me to thinking just how fundamentally important chickens must be to the Malaysian food industry. Just think how many thousands and thousands and thousands of chickens are reared, fed and slaughtered every year just so that Malaysian gourmands and their foreign guests like me can enjoy this most delicious and succulent of meats.

Then I thought, what must it be like to be a chicken? Well, it must be a pretty scary and precarious existence. Just imagine, you start life so hopefully and positively, cracking open the egg with your little beak with such lust for life, such hope for the future. Then, you wobble around getting used to living in this world and if you're lucky, you might be allowed to roam free around the farmyard, pecking at seeds or whatever, and if you are really skillful and fortunate, you might not get run over by a motorbike or eaten by a dog.

And the rather more unlucky ones will of course be brought up in overcrowded, de-humanising (de-chickenising?) conditions in a battery farm with a couple of square millimetres of floor space to live in and no TV. But at least they are alive. Just.

And whether free range or battery, all these poor optimistic creatures will be fed and fed so that they grow bigger and fatter, and the females will be forced to produce eggs. And then, one day, they will be taken away and slaughtered. Halal or non-halal, it's still the same thing. Dead is dead. Then they end up in our stomachs. So it goes....

So I was thinking, which is the most endangered animal on Earth? Most people might say the tiger. But is it the tiger or the chicken? Just think about it for a moment, before screaming at me.

Let's look at the tiger. Sure, there are lots of commendable efforts to save the tigers from extinction and all that but, let's face it, they are still heading for extinction. That's mainly because firstly, some people make big money selling tigers' whiskers and other tiger parts to rich men all over South East Asia who want to improve their sexual performance. And let us not forget that tigers go around eating people and people don't like that, so they are going to still try their best to kill as many tigers as they can. So tigers are doomed.

But chickens, as far as I know, none of their bits are used as aphrodisiacs. Also, crucially, chickens don't kill anybody. In fact, it's the other way around. And there are absolutely millions and millions of them. So even though it must be quite scary and worrying to be a chicken, at least their survival as a species is secure, as long as people keep on eating them.

So my message to those trying to save the tigers is quite simple. Start eating tigers. Tiger steaks. Tiger burgers. Tiger sandwiches. Tiger biscuits!! That way, the long term survival of the tiger will be as secure and safe as that of the chicken!!!

;-)