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?
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