I’ll Give Up My Chicken When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands

John Rubino

Last week I had dinner with two friends, one of whom is what the mainstream would call a conspiracy nut. Over the course of a couple of hours and a bunch of margaritas he walked us through everything from the government’s role in 9/11 to the FEMA internment camps to the surge in gun regulations, all of which are scary, but also mostly beyond my experience. I’m a finance guy who gets the monetary side of what’s coming, but I don’t own guns (yet) and have no first-hand knowledge of 9/11 or FEMA camps. So – while some or all of these things might be true – it was still a bit academic.

Then we got to something I could relate to: Apparently the U.S. is getting ready to require every citizen who owns even a single backyard chicken to register their livestock and implant them with a microchip that will allow both identification and tracking. The chicken (or goat or pig) owner will be required to notify the government when the animal is moved, say to the county fair 4-H barn. And when the animal dies the owner will have to fill out a form and submit it to the authorities within 24 hours. AND the owner will be required to register visitors to their property, whether they come into contact with the livestock or not.

This sounded too ridiculous to be real. The other conspiracies at least have plausible, if dark, rationales, like setting us up for a war, containing troublesome mobs of unemployed private sector workers, or putting gun owners under the thumb of the ATF. But why would a would-be dictator care about the neighbor’s chickens?

The story continues …..