This evening the Evening Standard headline boards read ""Lock Up All Chickens" Say Scientists".
That's a pretty hard headline to beat, don't you think? Especially if you had been away or alone for a long time and were unaware of the current bird flu scare. What alternative scenario would you conjure up in your mind? Why was the scientific community so incensed with the chickens? What had they done to deserve incarceration? Not just a few errant chicken individuals, but all chickens. All of them must be punished.
I presumed the headline was referring to the idea that you could protect chickens from bird flu by keeping them indoors, which is presumably the advice of some scientists - though what qualifications were required to come to this conclusion are unclear. But the more I thought about it, the more sensationist I found the language. Did the scientists actually call for the birds to be "locked up"? Is there any need, once chickens are inside, to lock the door. Surely just closing the door will be enough. They are birds and with the best will in the world do not have the ability to open even an unlocked door. To be honest they probably wouldn't even have the imagination to try. The film
Chicken Run is not an accurate depiction of chickens or their abilities. Isn't it more likely that the scientists said "Keep your chickens indoors for a bit," perhaps adding for exceptionally thick farmers, "Make sure you keep the doors and windows closed at all times though because chickens could get outside or diseased birds could fly in."
The journalist from the Standard thought, well that's not a very punchy head-line, lets embroider and editorialise a little and make it "Lock Up All Chickens", which has the advantage of being very like the phrase "Lock Up All Paedos" which is a headline I am sure they have already used before, so they only have to reset one word in the printing press.
What I also like about the headline is that it implies this is the advice not of one scientist, but that all scientists have gathered to discuss the issue, put their egg-heads together and come up with this solution. I doubt this happened, but yet the Standard have lumped all scientists together to make it look like this is the best advice that them and their science can come up with. It implies a powerless in the scientific community. we may have degrees coming out of our white lab coats, but our combined wisdom can come up with no other solution than to lock up all chickens. You might think that locking them up is an over-reaction given their door opening abilities and a theory based on fear, but we (all scientists remember) are afraid and the situation is this desperate. Lock up all the chickens and then go and hide in an underground bunker for the next ten years and hope that by 2016 the danger will have passed.
But then I actually bought the paper and saw the news of Andrew Collings' depraved sexual proclivities had already made it to the press. Lock up your chickens, Collings is in town. He has the ability to open closed doors so please use locks unless you want all of your birds defiled and roasted alive. Also lock up your ducks. They are most at danger.
