There's No Chicken Like Old Chicken Like No Chicken I Know
Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)
Ted was pivotin' this morning more than usual due to a problem that we won't go into in this venue. (No, no, no, we don't need to go there). But we can share one of the pivots.
As has been mentioned on one or two occasions before in this expansive topic, Ted knows just about everything there is to know about the animal processing business process. And what Ted may not actually know, he has theories on. That being the case here's what Ted shared with the CO this morning.
A while back one of Ted's partial peer group, a chicken rancher, discovered there was a market in Houston for old chickens. Sometimes these old chickens could be unloaded for up to $15/old chicken. Perhaps that's because chickens don't generally get old, and scarcity makes the market.
"Who wants these old chickens?" you ask. Well, apparently, immigrants to these Yorenited States from the Caribbean and other points south of the border and maybe even Africa have a preference for old chickens. (By the way, these old chickens have to be alive and inspectable as such (alive) at the time of any business transactions involving them, the old chickens). According to Ted, this preference for old chickens is rooted in religion. Some people want old stove up chickens that have had a full life and were better off in the past, for the purpose of sacrifice and/or eatin', as opposed to young chickens who have their whole lives ahead of them and have much to look forward to in the sphere of bein' a chicken. Also, Ted theorized that people with old chicken preferences might believe in re-incarnation (transmigration is another possibility) and were desiring of putting the old chickens out of old chicken misery in a humane fashion, because these old chickens may have once been people too, maybe.
So being aware of this cultural phenomena, Ted's chicken rancher peer loaded up a truck with 200 old chickens and headed for Houston expecting to fetch in the neighborhood of $15/old chicken which ciphers into the neighborhood of $3000, as you may know, a tidy sum for old chickens. But when he (the chicken rancher) arrived at the old chicken market and displayed his wares, the potential customers noticed that he had a great many old chickens, in fact, many more old chickens than the market would bear. And they began to dicker and soon the dickered price plummeted lower and lower, much like a flightless bird on its own at a great altitude.
The drop in the prospective price per old chicken aggravated the chicken rancher and he became so aggravated when the proferred offers hit $5 that he loaded up his old chickens and returned with them to his chicken ranch, er, chicken house where he released the unwanted flock back into the general population. A short time later his chickens began to sicken and die and then those chickens got quarantined and were eventually all executed by the authority of the Yorenited States government. The chickens, old and young alike, had got avian influenza, apparently from the ones who had visited the old chicken market.
Ted was pivotin' this morning more than usual due to a problem that we won't go into in this venue. (No, no, no, we don't need to go there). But we can share one of the pivots.
As has been mentioned on one or two occasions before in this expansive topic, Ted knows just about everything there is to know about the animal processing business process. And what Ted may not actually know, he has theories on. That being the case here's what Ted shared with the CO this morning.
A while back one of Ted's partial peer group, a chicken rancher, discovered there was a market in Houston for old chickens. Sometimes these old chickens could be unloaded for up to $15/old chicken. Perhaps that's because chickens don't generally get old, and scarcity makes the market.
"Who wants these old chickens?" you ask. Well, apparently, immigrants to these Yorenited States from the Caribbean and other points south of the border and maybe even Africa have a preference for old chickens. (By the way, these old chickens have to be alive and inspectable as such (alive) at the time of any business transactions involving them, the old chickens). According to Ted, this preference for old chickens is rooted in religion. Some people want old stove up chickens that have had a full life and were better off in the past, for the purpose of sacrifice and/or eatin', as opposed to young chickens who have their whole lives ahead of them and have much to look forward to in the sphere of bein' a chicken. Also, Ted theorized that people with old chicken preferences might believe in re-incarnation (transmigration is another possibility) and were desiring of putting the old chickens out of old chicken misery in a humane fashion, because these old chickens may have once been people too, maybe.
So being aware of this cultural phenomena, Ted's chicken rancher peer loaded up a truck with 200 old chickens and headed for Houston expecting to fetch in the neighborhood of $15/old chicken which ciphers into the neighborhood of $3000, as you may know, a tidy sum for old chickens. But when he (the chicken rancher) arrived at the old chicken market and displayed his wares, the potential customers noticed that he had a great many old chickens, in fact, many more old chickens than the market would bear. And they began to dicker and soon the dickered price plummeted lower and lower, much like a flightless bird on its own at a great altitude.
The drop in the prospective price per old chicken aggravated the chicken rancher and he became so aggravated when the proferred offers hit $5 that he loaded up his old chickens and returned with them to his chicken ranch, er, chicken house where he released the unwanted flock back into the general population. A short time later his chickens began to sicken and die and then those chickens got quarantined and were eventually all executed by the authority of the Yorenited States government. The chickens, old and young alike, had got avian influenza, apparently from the ones who had visited the old chicken market.
posted by ray pistrum at Monday, September 19, 2005
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