FARMING is a tough gig, for man and beast. But that doesn’t mean you can excuse any sort of cruelty.
And let’s face it, we have to read about too much of that too often.
Such as the war against caged – or battery – hens. Quite right too.
Until you have been in one of those places and copped a real sense of what it means you don’t really understand eggs on an industrial scale. However, with all the publicity about cages you’d think the average human was alert (and we always need more lerts) to the fact being caged is not much fun.
Well you’d be wrong, it seems. Because another industry has sprung up on the back of cages. Fighting. Yes, fighting. Now the old Whacker might have been a little slow off the mark here because I seldom troll the depths to which humanity can sink.
But left in charge of some of the junior grandlings the other day I could hear a real ruckus coming from the TV room at their home and finally had to get up off the chair and see what the little tykes were up to.
Picture this if you can: The eldest (all nine years of him) had the youngest (barely five years of him) pinned down by the throat, with one knee across his chest. The middle child was on the ground beside them doing a countdown.
“Let him go you,” I shouted.
“But Whacker,” the two eldest whined (I noticed junior, now getting his colour back, did not support the cry), “we’re cage fighting.”
“What the hell are you prattling on about boy?” I demanded. At which point they both turned and pointed to the massive TV their stupid parents had put on the wall. For kids. Whatever next?
Where, blow me down, was this show with guys inside a cage of chicken wire, beating the daylights out of each other. If there were rules, I could not work them out.
But the audience, as big as grand final day at the MCG, was literally baying for blood. So here I have these three pre-pubescent grandlings already trying to imitate the carnage on the screen – and let me tell you, one of these guys would have needed an ambulance I reckon, by the time the other was finished with him.
Which might help explain why older children fed on a diet of this garbage might think it acceptable to imitate my grandlings and start beating up each other. As a cyber-savvy dude (so the lady at the library, who has been running a computer class for people of my vintage, tells me) I did a bit of research on this insanity.
It is huge. It is global. One guy I looked up has already had more than 320 fights, according to his website. It listed his wins, draws and losses.
Which, when I added them up, came to 323. Clearly he was so banged up in a few of his bouts he has no memory of them so they didn’t make his statistics. Or, possibly, he went to school here where complex things such a reading, writing and arithmetic seem to have been too hard for the system and the students, so they were dropped to allow better pass marks from simpler subjects.
Whatever brains he may have had would be long gone now, belted out of his brain box or turned into porridge by collisions with the cage wall.
As soon as I finish this week’s word from the wise I will be emailing the local member and telling him to get on the job and get this away from our children.
Mind you, he probably should be kept in a cage, and if he did have any brains at some time in his earlier life, I am proud to say I, along with a queue of many others, might have relocated a few of them myself on the footy field a few years ago. Which also explains how he ended up in politics.
