Senator John Kennedy said in a tweet and in more detail during a live interview: “Most Americans think a whole lot more about character than they do about race. They also understand that, to a bear, we all taste like chicken.”
I would like to, as my daughter often says, ‘unpack’ this spin off of a Martin Luther King Junior proclamation, which may or may have been out of context from MLK Jr’s original intent. It’s always so interesting to me to have an initial reaction of “hell yes” to a statement and then ask questions, dig just a little under the surface and see if my reaction changes to “yes but…”.
And so upon further reflection I would like to explore bears and chickens.
I love bears as much as I do all of the creatures on this earth. But I will tell you that for quite a number of years I had a very frightening and recurring dream about being chased by a bear. So my love is more akin to the deep appreciation I have for tranchulas, bees and a couple of my sons when they first wake up in the morning: love from a distance. Unless of course we are talking about fictional bears like Winnie the Pooh, Yogi Bear, Kung Foo Panda, the Coca-Cola Polar Bears or Buster Moon from the movie “Sing”. Though according to bearwithus.org there are eight different species of bears in the world of which the Koala is in none. Sorry Buster Moon: the Koala ‘Bear’ is not a bear but a very chill marsupial that spends twenty hours a day sleeping and the other four eating eucalyptus leaves.
The North American Black Bear(1) can actually be black, bluish-black, and in rare cases white. Black bears typically eat vegetables and fruits and consequently can live up to 25 years in the wild, which is perhaps a plug for a plant based diet. Upon this exploration of bear ‘types’, I can say with 99% certainty that it was a black bear chasing me in my dreams and I’m pretty sure that he or she was high on cocaine and was just having a “what the fuck is happening here?” moment. It could be that I was trying to lead the poor thing to safety because it is important to note that the REAL “Cocaine Bear” did NOT kill a single person but instead sadly died from drug overdose. So now my dream is no longer scary but devastating and I hope that the next time I dream about this poor confused bear that there is a shit ton of NARCAN in my purse and I can right a wrong.
Brown Bears(2) can be almost black, brown, very light brown like Yogi and sometimes blonde like Winnie the Pooh. They eat a lot of fish and berries and DUH honey. No where can I find online that they eat chickens, but cartoon picnic baskets often contain fried chicken, so I’m sure one could search and find Yogi Bear happily eating a drumstick somewhere in the Hanna-Barbera footage.
Polar Bears(3) are known for being white, but technically have translucent hair follicles that only appear white by reflecting visible light, a genetic adaptation to camouflage them in their surroundings which in the typical environment of the polar bear is glacier snow. I will not deeply digress about the sad state of the polar bears and how some are starting to turn yellow or brownish due to the dwindling glacier habitat because it’s not in my skill set to know whether global warming is a natural billion year cycle of life or one more reason to feel guilty for being human. But I do know that had it been a Polar Bear chasing me in my sleep, I would have died instantly from a heart attack during the very first dream from being eaten in one fell swoop, the bear not even taking a second to think “hmmmm….tastes like chicken” before grabbing a coke to help wash down my coat and boots.
Asiatic black-bears (4) have short snouts, very large ears, and a crescent shaped white patch of fur (a moon) on their chests, which makes me wonder if Buster Moon might have some kind of genetic connection to the bear species after all. (I’m practically a bear genealogist now). Asiatic black-bears’ diet is only 5% carnivore, which includes birds that may or may not be chickens.
Andean Bears (5) are an endangered species and like some of the bears listed here, it is illegal to kill them. They prefer a vegetable and fruit diet but have been known to eat a chicken or two when in desperation. They are sometimes called spectacled bears because they have varying shapes of black glasses on their faces surrounded by white or beige fur. These marks are slightly unique to each bear so that they know they are talking to Frank instead of Bob at miscellaneous bear socials.
It turns out that the Giant Panda (6) and the Red Panda which is NOT a bear by human definition (because apparently we are the bosses of what a creature is or is not) are only remotely related based on the same elongated wrist bones (false thumbs) and their mutual love for bamboo shoots. The Red Panda looks more like a red raccoon-skunk-fox blend. I would encourage you to look them up: they are super cool. But they are NOT bears so don’t really belong in this discussion. Giant Pandas are born pink, hairless, blind and very vulnerable. In the wild, Giant Pandas CAN be known to eat meat in the form of birds but it is rare. They really just want to hang out and eat bamboo shoots and a few dumplings and do a little kung fu when necessary to protect their naked pink babies.
The (7) Sloth Bear and the (8) Sun Bear both have long or flexible snouts and tongues designed for consuming ants and termites and I wonder about their genetic link to the aardvark. Neither are particularly carnivorous, though I think the ants and termites might beg to differ.
Now that you better understand bears and their tidy little categories from which I have firmly ostracized the Koala and the Red Panda, who may or may not identify as bears, let’s move on to chickens.
I love chickens. I also like to eat chicken. It’s somewhat of a moral quandary when I ponder it long enough.
We once had a Polish Crested chicken named Blackie-Brown who hung out in the back yard with our three Khaki Campbell ducks who were hatched from an incubator in the basement bedroom of our oldest son. See how I thought it was important to define what type of chicken and ducks we had? I just couldn’t help it. I don’t want you to visualize Blackie-Brown as a Rhode Island Red or Barred Rock or a German Langshan instead of our black and brown poofy headed girl who came into the house from time to time and would sometimes sit on our shoulders. She was an occasional carnivore: shamelessly eating bugs when she felt like hunting. She once voraciously consumed a chicken nugget, tricked into cannibalism by the deep fried coating. We had to retrieve her every night from the big fur tree in the front yard where she liked to go to get away from the ducks. We had to shove her against her will into the protective pen with the quackers so that the fat neighborhood raccoons or the hawk on the hill would not decapitate her. But she was free otherwise, roaming about the backyard, living her best life until my husband eventually gave our foursome away to a young couple who had some acreage and the ability to give them an even better life. He was tired of duck poop in the pool. But knowing Blackie-Brown and the Khaki Quackers gave me a more up close and personal appreciation for ducks and chickens. I loved looking at their feathers, their mannerisms and how they co-existed, despite being from two different bird categories. Their eggs were a gift to us and I said thank you to them every day for helping to feed our big family.
Recently I listened to an Oprah’s Supersoul podcast episode where her guest was Michael Pollan who, among many other things, wrote the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”. On the podcast episode, he gently spoke of mindfulness about our food sources, especially when consuming living creatures. He was in no way condemning but was indeed enlightening, placing this idea into my mind: “Heather, maybe you should not eat chicken if you can’t actually kill a chicken.” Sucker punch right to the gut. I won’t even kill a bug yet I will sit hypocritically in line at the Chick-fil-a drive through. But since that podcast episode, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to be a chicken crammed tightly into a cage with way too many other chickens, where it could not go up in a tree to roost or kick its feet in the dust or feel the fresh air on its face. We all have a right to do that. Aside from knowing the fact that Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays which is nice: maybe it’s a holy day for chickens, I found myself wondering about their stance on animal welfare as the nation’s largest fast food chicken chain. According to their website, they follow some pretty tight rules of engagement for animal wellbeing, at least in the United States, requiring all its suppliers to have climate controlled barns, where chickens are cageless and free to roam and roost and scratch in the dirt and there is at least an attempt to minimize stress prior to the imminent deaths of the chickens, though I’m not sure how they do this. Maybe they put a bit of valium in the chicken feed on death day.
Please know that I fully understand that the massive industrial production of food is an enormous and complex topic. BUT maybe being selective in where I buy my food based on how the animals are treated right up to their death is SOMETHING. Saying a quick “thank you” before I consume what was once a living creature is another move in the direction of human kindness. I KNOW that I am more than likely never going to directly kill a chicken unless some kind of world event happens that puts me in that place. But I can work toward awareness of my role in the circle of life and perhaps lessen some of the cruelty by my thoughts, actions and sourcing.
On the flip side, I can predict with at least fifty percent accuracy that if a chicken were the size of Godzilla, it would eat me without hesitation and quite possibly think I tasted like the bear it consumed on Sunday.
Unless of course she was Blackie-Brown Godzilla, who was raised in a pretty cool environment: well fed, sheltered and safe to roam about to do chicken stuff. (Yes I know that if she were the size of Godzilla it might have been difficult for us to manage: this is an analogy sillies.) It is very possible that if a bear cub were raised with a chicken, they would be besties. So much depends first and foremost upon the unique nature of each chicken and bear. There are some jerk bears and buttface chickens out there, who are just not able to be nice. But in some cases, this jerk-buttface mentality may very well have been caused by the second important factor for getting along: the environment in which they were born into or were forced upon.
Most animals, human or otherwise, with a healthy living environment where there is love, shelter, food, water and freedom to be who they want to be, have a better chance of forming a positive emotional connection with other creatures in their habitat and will be less likely to kill each other, save for the occasional deep-seeded need for a good steak.
According to the story of creation (and the science of evolution), humans were made last. But this does not mean we are any more miraculous or important than a bear or a chicken. Our ability to think and therefore know things in a manner that is perhaps unique to all the other living creatures does not put us in a place of superiority but instead a place of servitude.
That’s our only real job.
So maybe we should throw away our labels makers. Or only use them for office supplies and food storage bins.
Bears and chickens probably don’t have any concern about what ‘type’ of bear or chicken they are. They are busy BEING and not overthinking things. And in this place of being, they probably have a deeper and more intuitive understanding than humans do that they all came from the same little microcosm put onto earth by our maker The Genius Artist who said: “here is a little speck of energy that is destined by my creative and miraculous vision to become a beautiful, expansive, deep variety of unique and wondrous living beings. Now go forth, be kind and loving, and only eat each other when it is truly necessary.”
peaceof8 