A
friend once asked what to do when you suddenly discover you’ve been too far
from a person whom you respect and has been of great impact to your hustle. The
answer I discovered was to plan an unplanned trip the next weekend to
apologize. So I went to Ilorin last weekend, and paid Alhaji N. I. Raji a
visit. A great man he is I must tell you.
But
this post isn’t about him nor the trip, its about a sight that caught my wondering
fancy around Ogbomosho on my way back. So philosophical it made me think, so
sudden I couldn’t reach for my phone to take a picture. But let me try to describe
it as much as I can.
From
my front seat of the Sienna-type car I took, I saw, on the left side of the
road a cage, the type used in poultries to collect eggs, filled with chickens.
Was just a row, five enclosures at best, about ten chickens as temporary tenants.
The bewilderment struck when a dove, free as air, perched on the feeding trough
for a cheap balanced diet.
*Insert imagined picture*
This
picture to any other eyes could infer a million other profound thoughts, but
the question I asked me was;
“What
was life for chickens before we caged them for their eggs and penned them for
their meat?”
In
that line of thought, the superiority of the human race amongst others may be
discussed, but I was more interested in the resulting dogma. Now, we all
believe beyond reasonable doubt that chickens were created to be food for
humans in all stages of their pensionless lives.
Maybe
not all stages sha, but most… eggs through old age
My
major muse is this, could there be other animals that haven’t been domesticated
yet by the human race, but due in part to our “knowledge of what-is” i.e. what
we met and have been told is good and allowed, we have refused to try new
leads?
How
was the chicken domesticated? Couldn’t we domesticate new birds too? Must we
not explore because the ones before us did already?
On
a broader perspective, there are a lot of dogmas we hold on to because we “met
it that way”, or “that’s just the way it is” and questioning them a lot of
times seem really stupid (some would argue this post is :D) , but no real
development occurs without a marked change in thinking from "what is" to "what you
want it to be".
In
short, dogmas are comfortable, change isn’t.
Or
what do you think will happen to the chicken if humanity ever stopped bullying
it?