Chicken Dogma

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?