When I was a little girl of about six or seven years, we had a white Silkie, a chicken with a lovely plumage of fluffy white feathers and dark skin. He was the closest thing we had to a dog. I have always wanted a dog and had once smuggled our neighbour’s mongrel into our house and kept him for a couple of hours under the bed, because two hours is just about the maximum time we can keep a dog and ourselves under a bed quietly without him howling blue murder or without my co-conspirator, my brother B1 hollering the same.
My Dad would never have allowed a pet dog. Or at least I assumed he wouldn’t but we were too terrified of him to ask. In those days, you don’t ask Dad for anything. If he is minded to give, he would. And since he was more liberally minded to give whips and lashes, we generally gave Dad a wide berth especially during report card day.
Ah Leong was the name of my pet chicken. Because my Mom said he was a Leong Koay, which I take now to be the Hokkien equivalent of the Silkie chicken. Come to think of it, I never knew if Ah Leong was male or female. Back then, I wasn’t terribly imaginative when it came to naming pets. Years later when I finally had my first pet dog, she was named Brownie because she was brown. Actually I wanted to call her Blackie, but the brains of the family, my sister S2 said I can’t call a brown dog black and I had to defer to her ample wisdom, she being older and smarter and all.
I helped my Dad cut the chicken wires and nail together a makeshift chicken coop which we kept Ah Leong in, in our tiny kitchen in Klang. My ever loving Mom’s pragmatic plan for raising Ah Leong was to kill two birds with one stone or in this case to kill one bird with two stones so to speak, to allow me an ephemeral pet and to ready him for the pot; for one day when I got home from school, the fluff of fair feathers was ostensibly absent and the aroma of Chinese herbal soup – a concoction of the usual dong quay, dong sum, goji berry, bak ji and hong dao was conspicuously present and simmering merrily in a 5 quart pot.
I never did partake in the nourishing goodness of the white Silkie despite its superior curative properties of being able to allevitate all sorts of chronic conditions from treating asthma and heart disease, curing infertility, banishing headaches to strengthening the immune system. Eating a pet just wasn’t my thing.
These days, you can’t go around giving a pet to your kid and then sticking it in a pot.
For one, that kid will probably need life long therapy, and at the going rate of psychologists these days it’s cheaper to separate the chick you want to eat from the chick you want to feed.
Secondly, you’ll have the local chapter of PETA or the SPCA picketing outside your house squawking murder most foul.
Thirdly, you might get slapped with a RM200 fine for animal abuse. And that’s the price of seven good sized grass-fed pastured organic chickens.
How the times have changed.
image credit : benjamint444
momsterthoughts 