We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren

Author:Peter Van Buren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Chicken Shit

Agriculture was what we really focused on in our rural area. Whether it was sheep, bees, or a milk-collection center, the goal was always to lift up the local economy and provide jobs that gave people an alternative to terrorism. The next front in our farm war would be chicken.

Very few people outside the agricultural world know that if the rooster in a flock dies the hens will continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks because “sperm nests,” located in the ovary ducts of hens, collect and store sperm as a survival mechanism to ensure fertile eggs even after the male is gone. I had to know this as part of my reconstruction of Iraq. Like learning that Baghdad produced eight thousand tons of trash every day, who could have imagined when we invaded Iraq that such information would be important to the Global War on Terror? If I were to meet George W., I would tell him this by way of suggesting that he did not know what he was getting the country into. I would also invite the former President along to visit a chicken-processing plant built with your tax dollars and overseen by my ePRT. We really bought into the chicken idea and spent like drunken sailors on shore leave to prove it. In this case, the price was $2.58 million for the facility.

The first indication this was all chicken shit was the smell as we arrived at the plant with a group of Embassy friends on a field trip. The odor that greeted us when we walked into what should have been the chicken killing fields of Iraq was fresh paint. There was no evidence of chicken killing as we walked past a line of refrigerated coolers. When we opened one fridge door, expecting to see chickens chilling, we found instead old buckets of paint. Our guide quickly noted that the plant had purchased twenty-five chickens that morning specifically to kill for us. This was good news, a 100 percent jump in productivity from previous days, when the plant killed no chickens at all.

The first step in Iraqi chicken killing was remarkably old. The plant had a small window, actually the single window in the whole place, that faced toward a parking lot and, way beyond that, Mecca. A sad, skinny man pulled a chicken out of a wire cage, showed it the parking lot, and then cut off its head. The man continued to grab, point, and cut twenty-five times. Soon twenty-five heads accumulated at his feet. The sharply bright red blood began to pool on the floor, floating the heads. It was enough to turn you vegan on the spot, swearing never to eat anything substantive enough to cast a shadow. The slasher did not appear to like or dislike his work. He looked bored. I kept expecting him to pull a carny sideshow grin or wave a chicken head at us, but he killed the chickens and then walked out.

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