Elmer's Brother

Fowl Play
"International Respect for Chickens Day Celebrates Chickens" reads the headline on a press release:

United Poultry Concerns is launching International Respect for Chickens Day on May 4th. We're urging everyone to do an ACTION of compassion for chickens on that day. This can range from writing a letter to the editor to tabling at a local mall to showing the movie Chicken Run to students, family and friends.

"International Respect for Chickens Day is a day to celebrate the dignity, beauty, and life of chickens and to protest against the bleakness of their lives in farming operations," says UPC president Karen Davis.

We don't just respect chickens, we love them, especially slathered with our homemade barbecue sauce and broiled. As for Karen Davis, in February she penned a letter to the editor of the Washington Post:

Rick Weiss's Feb. 1 news story, "Bird Brains Get Some New Names, and New Respect," was deeply gratifying to those of us who spend our days with birds. We have been waiting to see scientific language and understanding catch up with the reality of bird intelligence.

I spend my days with domestic chickens and turkeys, birds that have long been denigrated as stupid, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Just watch a hen calculate how to speed to her perch at night to avoid a certain attentive rooster in the way, and you know that a smart chick is looking out for her own interests.

The day may come when to be called a "chicken" or a "turkey" will be rightly regarded as a salute to a person's intelligence.

It seems this chick is serious! The UPC press release also quotes St. John de Crevecoeur in "Letters From an American Farmer," musing on what might have been:

I never see an egg brought to my table but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle, useful hen leading her chickens with a care and vigilance which speaks shame to many women. A cock perhaps, arrayed with the most majestic plumes, tender to his mate, bold, courageous, endowed with an astonishing instinct, with thoughts, with memory, and every distinguishing characteristic of the reason of man.

Watch for the ACLU (American Chicken Liberties Union) to weigh in on the age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the fetus?

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Dan O'Shea, Michael Lieber, John Williamson, Joel Goldberg, N.W. Larkin, Dennis Kuzara, Jack Archer, Ruth Papazian, Barak Moore, Pete August, William Katz, Matthew McInteer, Chuck Opramolla, Ethel Fenig, Charlie Gaylord, Robert Spector, Tom Linehan, Phil Hord, Alan Jones, Michael Newton, Dave Sibert, John Forsberg, James Eggert, Robert Lesley, René Lajous, Michael Kingsley, Mona Norman, Bill Ryan, Rod Pennington and Frank Russo. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)