All those poor innocent little chickens. They all have to die. And it was not their fault at all. Just happened to be there when the awful chicken influenza virus struck. Clucking around the farm, and then all the trucks came and rounded them up for the gassing. All nine thousand of them and more. See you later. Real bummer little chickens. Extra safety precautions demand that even the healthy chickens within a radius of thirty kilometers also have to go. Round them up along with all the rest. Too bad, but you never know now, do you?

This is what a local Dutch newspaper had to say:

"Het ruimen van de eerste verdachte boerderij in het Gelderse Laren is maandagochtend begonnen, zo heeft een woordvoerster van het ministerie van Landbouw meegedeeld. De kippen worden in een bak bedwelmd met het gas CO2. Daarna worden ze voor destructie afgevoerd."

Which when translated into broken English means something like this:

"The clearing away of the first suspicious farm in the Gelders Laren started Monday morning, says the spokeswoman of the Minister of Agriculture. The chickens were first gassed with C02. Afterward they are taken away for destruction."

Just to tickle your fancy, here comes the ironic part. The truth of the matter is that in this country more than a million chickens are normally killed per day just to feed us, the all consuming "hungry souls" who rule the planet. That's alot more than nine thousand chickens, a hundred times more, but does that ever get noticed? You never see any front page news about that happening now do you? One million nine thousand chicken lives ended in a fraction of a second, just like that.

Gruesome, isn't it? But that's life. Isn't it?

In protest I will refuse to eat any chicken for the rest of my life. Well, at least the rest of this week anyway.