A Feathery Tale

Once upon a time not long ago in a Hen House near the town of Parker, there was prosperity for all the chickens. Everyone laid their share of eggs and everybody got their fair share of chicken feed, for there was plenty for everyone.

Gradually though, many of the original hens died off, and newer ones replaced them. These older hens, who now numbered only 1% of the total hen population had gotten lazy and fat. They decided they could hatch a scheme to get most all of the chicken feed without having to compete with the other hens or work very hard at laying eggs.

They told the farmer that these 1%’ers, as they called themselves now, could lay golden eggs, and therefore were much much more valuable than the other 99% of the chickens. Because of this, they said, they should get the biggest nests to lay their eggs in and get the lion share of the chicken feed – 213% more chicken feed to be precise.

The farmer willingly obliged. But to do this he had to cut some of the feed for the other chickens since there was only so much chicken feed to go around. The other hens worked three times as hard to produce more and more eggs, but since their food was less, their eggs were smaller.

Meanwhile the older hens had it made. They would show the farmer their one or two golden eggs in their nest, and the farmer kept giving them more and more perks. To keep fooling the famer, they told him that golden eggs were harder to lay, and that they needed to sit on them much longer before they could be gathered .

They demanded that the farmer should give even less to the other chickens so that they could keep producing more golden eggs.

Soon the other chickens were pushed out of their nests and forced to find nesting space anywhere they could find it.

They built huge fences to keep out the chickens that looked odd or darker and were of Mexican breeds.

As egg production fell, and egg lays were off, the farmer grew impatient and decided to harvest those golden eggs that he had been promised by those 1%’ers. He went into the coop one day when the chickens were asleep, and took those few golden eggs they had been sitting on for so long.

As he picked them up, he found them to be extremely fragile and cracked to pieces with the slightest pressure. On closer examination it turns out they weren't gold at all, but only painted that way. When he scratched the surface of the eggs, they shattered revealing a toxic mess of rotten egg! The mess was so bad that the other chickens stopped laying altogether.

Soon there were no eggs and most of the other 99% were living on what they could forage.

Still the 1%’ers insisted that it was all just a big misunderstanding, and if the farmer would just continue to give them more food and let them keep their bigger nests, they would produce those promised golden eggs.

While most chickens weren’t taken in by this ruse, some of the chickens – most notably the tea colored ones got very angry, said “It's all the farmer's fault! He should Take the feed away from those other chickens who don’t belong here anyway. Make them go back to where they came from."

And then all the rest of the birds became Angry Birds, and soon everybody was just throwing eggs at each other instead of laying them for their common benefit.

So moral of this story is……well you can make up your own.