Drivel

We encourage independence here in our enchanting illusion of paradise in the bush. It's really a thrill on a tranquil morning if Bessy can get her stripling calf to do the milking, or if one of our more acrobatic chickens can fly up to the loft and peck a hole in a handy feed sack so it trickles down for everyone's breakfast. It has taken several years of tolerant trust, dawdling patiently over our morning coffee, to allow our critters to achieve that needed inner strength to gain this liberty. It really shows though in the equanimity they bestow upon life and their condescending attitude towards those mortals who view them as servile creatures.

To embellish on H.L. Mencken, we champion the thinking that the urge to nurture critters is almost always a false face for the urge to rule them. John Locke wrote, also with a sprig of floridity, that in the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any superior power on earth. Creatures are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule.

Now you may think, Garlic Hornswoggler, you're just full of drivel and your making all this up because your just too damnably lazy to get up in the morning and do your chores. But you know, Aristotle, he wrote that fiction is more philosophic and more serious than fact, because it speaks of universals rather than particulars; there is more truth in understanding the soul of a man like Homer’s Odysseus than in knowing, to quote Aristotle, what “Alcibiades did or had done to him.” And with our perceptions of truth and fact being so dependant on upbringing and environment, who's to say that fiction doesn't incarnate in the eye of the beholder? So we bet that puts you in your place.

So, we have installed this motto in the hen house and the barn which says “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin.” Our biggest challenge here is that they really have taken this all to heart and we're all having a tough sell in finding the fitting philosophical bent to endow them with the liberty to clean their own pens. You all keep that pot covered now, OK?