EDITORIAL

Here Chicken! Chicken!

Monday, May 24, 2004

Recently, the Chief Agriculture and Veterinary Officer indicated that feral chickens are the pox of Cayman Islands, and something that this country must deal with proactively.

He suggested that bounties be put on the heads of every free-roaming chicken in Cayman, so that we now have the prospect of poultry posses roaming the island, intent on putting a stray chicken in every pot.

The proposal brings up many interesting questions and possibilities.

If the government plans to offer a bounty, is such reward open only to Caymanians? If an expatriate wished to participate, would he or she have to get a work permit as a chicken hunter? Will the government be advertising “Chicken Hunters Wanted” in order to comply with the statutory requirement?

And being the headline issue that it is, it will, of course, be necessary to establish a new public authority to oversee the chicken crisis. The Chicken Control Authority (CCA) will require a Chairman (preferably one who knows nothing whatsoever about chickens or chicken hunting) and the customary secretariat, with commensurate funding.

Chicken hunting licences could become a good source of revenue for the government, helping us to build our much-needed new roads. To be fair though, we should honour our feathered friends by giving the new thoroughfares such names as ‘Cock-a-doodle-do Highway’ or ‘Clucker’s Lane’.

To get the hunting public in the right mood, posters proclaiming ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ with an artist’s rendition of the foul fowl could be placed at the post offices and other prominent locations. And the reward offered obviously wouldn’t be considered chicken feed. While the rest of the world panics over avian flu, Cayman entrepreneurs, when considering their new moneymaking opportunity, can delight in chicken fever.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a prospect too good to be missed by the tourism sector. We could advertise Cayman Safaris, offering the intrepid chicken hunter from abroad the opportunity of venturing into the bush, hot on the trail of a rogue chicken.

The Chief Agriculture and Veterinary Officer suggested that the chickens could be used for food, in which case perhaps for efficiency’s sake only chefs should be issued chicken hunting licences so that cluckers and crowers go right from their fate to the plate, thus eliminating costly middlemen.

Maybe we could even host Million-Dollar Chicken Month, with the top prize going to the person catching the most chickens (no tag and release on this one), or maybe there could be a point system whereby roosters are scored highest, followed by hens, chicks and hatchlings in descending order of value.

Good public relations opportunities rarely come Cayman’s way these days, so perhaps we should seize the chance to develop a single person with personality to take care of our chicken problem. Instead of ‘Crocodile Hunter’, Cayman could offer the Animal Channel ‘Chicken Hunter’, and throw in Caribbean recipes to attract a following from the Food Channel as well. Maybe our Chicken Hunter can team up with Sponge Bob Square Pants in cartoons to show a real Cayman Islands adventure.

Of course, there will be the inevitable backlash from Cayman’s environmentalists, who will immediately start a ‘Save the Chickens’ campaign, bringing fowl experts from the world over to tell us why we should count our chickens after they are hatched, but not before killing them.

We could always just give captured chickens some provisions and send them on their way to exile somewhere else, and if Cuba would not take them to the north, perhaps the Swan Islands would to the south, and rename itself Chicken Islands, since there aren’t any swans there anyway.

In any event, it is always comforting to know that our government is yet again showing its mettle by addressing one of our most pressing national issues with bold measures that the chicken-hearted would never attempt.

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