NEWS - What to do with 30,000 sickly chickens and a couple of wood chippers

Q. What did one old retired hen say to the other? A. My, don't you look chipper today! Today's feature news story is about as good as they get. A pair of California poultry farmers found themselves with 30,000 unproductive chickens. The hens could no longer lay eggs, and due to a quarantine on the entire county for a poultry virus, they were unable to send the useless birds to a "kill facility" in the northern part of the state to be "properly" disposed of. They sought the consultation of the USDA on the matter, where a senior veterinarian apparently gave them the OK to use the wood chippers to dispose of the birds themselves. The Humane Society obviously threw a fit. The District Attorney's Office however concluded that the charges of animal cruelty would have to be dropped, as the farmers had sought advice from officials first before acting, although they very well may have been ill advised. Our favorite animal rights organization, PETA, is strangely absent from the scene. Perhaps because we're at least not eating the chickens? Anyways, what I find utterly ridiculous about this is, one way or another these chickens are going to die. What does it matter if it's in a wood chipper? Here's a short list of "approved" methods for murdering the birds: Carbon dioxide, gunshot, a projectile through the brain, or breaking their necks. What makes any of these methods any better? Any way you look at it, the chickens are dead. I'd imagine a wood chipper would provide a similar experience of nearly instantaneous death. Plus, you can kill more of them faster, so it's far more efficient than breaking their necks one by one. Are these animal rights activists worried about the chickens dying in pain? Personally, I can't fathom why anybody would be concerned with the electrical impulses from a bird's primitive nervous system to it's pea-sized brain. But if I were, then I think I'd also have issues with some of the "approved" methods too, like blasting them with a shotgun. Yet I don't hear any complaints about that one. I don't hear of any protests outside these "kill facilities". Well, short of PETA making the ridiculous comparison to Nazi death camps. The whole thing doesn't make sense to me. I think I'm gonna go to lunch and ponder this topic over a bucket of KFC.