extend your sympathies to some of hong kong’s pet owners.
as of today, it is illegal for hong kong residents to own or keep chickens/roosters/geese/ducks on their property. and some residents are fuming because they claim their c/r/g/d/ are pets, and do not deserve to die.
tough! says the hk sanitatation department signs, "let’s fight bird flu together".
why can’t a chicken be a friend? westerners find the concept of a chicken being a pet is just as foreign as the vietnamese accepting that westerners having dogs as anything else but food. i am glad that the government is doing it’s bit to prevent avian flu, but i do feel sorry for people who have to kill off their pets or risk a fine and get their pets carted away.
hong kong’s mini buses have recently been fit with seatbelts. the promotional signs encouraging people to buckle up read, "fasten your seatbelt! zero traffic accidents is hong kong’s goal!"
because i am too overwhelmed right now (and i am busy) to think about the bearing issues in my life, i had to concentrate on the smaller ones, such as "hmm, that statement isn’t really accurate, is it. fastening seatbelts won’t prevent traffic accidents so much as the severity of them."
but then again, you are talking to someone who doesn’t drive a vehicle. but i am right, aren’t i?
are you worried about avian flu? how big do you predict it will be?
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7 Replies to “recent legislation”
Just a stupid thought, how do seatbelts prevent traffic accidents? They prevent accidents if a vehicle GETS into an accident, but they won’t prevent a car from swerving through a red light.
Sorry, a bit anal-retentive today.
There ‘you’ go again, non-drivers telling us drivers the way things are. Of course wearing seat belts prevents accidents. If you are belted in you can’t swat the driver up side the head and distract him and cause him (sorry, or her) to swerve and cause an accident.
Hong Kong is a CITY. Keeping birds that are designed to swim in lakes or scratch the earth in a concrete world is inhumane. I had a dear friend who loved chickens. She let them in her house, they “nested” on her bed, perched on the sofa, etc. But those birds spent the majority of their time outside, in the sunshine, scraching at the dirt and running through the grass. She loved her chickens like children (she didn’t have any human ones), but moved to the countryside to have them. She wouldn’t dream of having them in a city!
HK is a crowded city. It is not a place for fowl. I love horses, but I wouldn’t have one in my apartment, parking it in the garage. Domestic cats and many breeds of dogs are perfect for city life. Caged birds are not.
I think avian flu will be big. It will be worse than the 1918 flu because we are such a mobile society. We should take every precaution.
It’s going to be big…
Happy Valentine’s Day!
It’s funny, though, I saw something on TV about having chickens as pets is becoming very fashionable in Seattle.
my sister once had a pet chicken named freckles. and while she never called it a pet, my mom was very fond of her barred rock rooster.
as for bird flu, i think it will be a bigger deal in the third world countries. there will hopefully be a vaccine for it by next flu season, which, along with better access to health care, will mitigate it’s effects in the west. hopefully it will attenuate some before/while it mutates into a human transmissable form. it may already be weaker than is currently thought.