Guest Post

Well, hello again! Long time, no see! Gloria here, the top chicken of the coop, here to bring you a poultry point of view. I don't often get to do a guest post, but since Bilbo has been here house-sitting for his daughter and all her animals, I took the opportunity to do a little hunt-and-pecking on the keyboard (ha, ha!) to share my observations from the run.

The last time I posted was back in January of last year, when I asked you to support my run for the presidency. I didn't win, of course ... the election was obviously rigged against me, with millions of my votes illegally switched to other, less-deserving poultry ... but I'm over the loss now. You elected Joe Biden, who seems like a good egg and is doing a pretty good job. Of course, after that last guy, the bar for acceptable performance hasn't been very hard to cross.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk to you about an important topic on which we chickens have a lot to teach you: pecking orders.

If you're interested, you can read how one of your more chicken-literate (chick-lit, if you will!) farmers explains our pecking order here, but I think you need to consider the advantages of our system in light of how you've messed up your own politics. 

The basic idea is simple: we peck at each other, and the strongest, most aggressive chicken becomes the leader - she (he, if it happens to be a rooster) pecks everyone else, and nobody pecks back. The number two chicken gets pecked by the leader, but gets to peck everyone else, and so on down the line until you reach the poor chicken at the bottom, who has nobody to peck and is generally pretty miserable.

It's a tough system, but it works well to help us keep our social and political stability. Occasionally, a chicken farther down the pecking order will try to unseat the leader, but usually gets put back in her place quickly and stability returns. 

Your human idea of the pecking order seems to be focused on what you call elections, in which you substitute votes for pecks. It's not a bad system, but it only works when the number-two peck- ... uh ... vote-getter understands why the system is important, accepts his or her place, and pecks everyone further down the flock to keep things orderly. It's worked more or less well for you so far, but now you have a noisy, strutting bantam rooster who can't accept that he was out-pecked and wants to overturn the pecking order and just cock-a-doodle-doo himself back onto the top roost. This is not good, and a lot of you don't seem to understand it.

We chickens get along well with each other because we understand and respect the pecking order. Obviously, each of us would rather rule the roost, but we understand that our system keeps things orderly and keeps the feathers from flying. It would be good thing for your humans to learn that lesson and start pecking back at noisily-aggressive bantamweights who think they should be the cock of the walk, no matter what anyone else thinks.

And that's your reality check from the coop. Time to turn things back over to Bilbo and get back to work in the yard. Those lesser chickens aren't going to peck themselves.

Have a good day. Bilbo will be back with more thoughts later. 'Til then, buck, buck, BUCKAWWWW!

Gloria