Of feeding, frenzy and injustice

Well now that the Christmas, New Year feeding frenzy is over, I hope my trousers will soon feel a little less er, cosy!
And since I can no longer say I'm too busy to do it I'd better check Barney Bear's junk email. This is something he doesn't like doing and I hate even his bit of my computer being full of this kind of babble. Now I once read about how there are people whose job is to read lists and select things from them. Such people could read lists at ridiculous speeds and select things so fast that they'd make my computer look a bit staid. (well by the time it's decided it can't actually search for names in my address book until I've set up something to do with indexing which, ominously, "may take a few minutes")
Well I can skim through Bear's junk email quite quickly too except that my attention tends to snag on the half visible subjects. No not those ones, the ones that say stuff like "are you just an average b....." And "Outstanding performance from fpth...".
Sometimes the inventiveness of the names catch my eye and often a little spurt of outrage will slow me down for a moment.
Which just goes to show that jobs which sound easy, probably aren't.
Anyway Outlook delivered 800 odd emails the other day which was worrying as that's a good bit more than we usually get. But it seems this was just a backlog from over the holiday period. And although it was likely 800 pieces of junk and babble, I did skim it through which was just as well since there was one genuine email in there somewhere!
Now why does an email from (insert perfectly ordinary name), entitled

"present for (insert another perfectly ordinary name)'s birthday",
achieve junk status while

"urgent email from (insert the name of a well known bank), "because we want to get hold of, oh sorry confirm, your account number"

gets shunted into the inbox?

Talking of feeding and frenzy. A couple of days ago, the idiot dog went off in the pouring rain and raided next door's compost heap. Later, he wasn't very interested in dinner and later still, he wasn't forthcoming when I took him out in the pouring rain to relieve himself. Later even more still, he used the shower in an unorthodox and entirely inappropriate manner.
Well it could have been worse. For instance it could have been me that discovered the unpleasantness or he could have left it on the carpet (just recovered from similar unacceptable leavings from the cats).
I suppose I should be impressed that, in extremis, both cats and dog choose the room which we use for the same purpose?
I am not impressed.
Well they are all now hoping I will let them go upstairs or outside alone. Butter wouldn't melt in any of their mouths they say and it's cold down here and I really need just a quick sniff-and-roll.
I am still not impressed.
I am tempted to build an anti animal flap and put all three of them on the other side of it for ever.

And talking of animals, feeding and frenzy, I've just seen the last of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's programmes about intensive chicken farming. (If you have tender feelings about chickens you might want to skip this bit and go straight to the pictures. Likewise if you're getting bored with my ranting. It seems to be a rant day!)
Myself, I'm not really sentimental about animals and I don't feel that fairness to chickens is a big deal. After all what's fair about killing them? It's not as though they get to kill us back!
But it is disgusting and horrifying to think that we* may have been eating animals which spent most of their short lives sitting around in each others' piss and shit, constantly eating and effectively prevented from sleeping or exercising.
Animals which live fairly normally it seems to me, will become fairly normal food. The sort of stuff which humankind have thrived on for a few millennia and which probably is quite good for them. It's just impossible to imagine that food obtained from animals reared in the sort of conditions so well depicted in Hugh's programme could possibly be good for anyone.
And while, I don't get excited about the unfairness of it all, it does seem to me that to encourage the whole chain of frenzied production to service the insane consumption levels so diligently stoked up by the supermarkets is an invitation to those multinational companies to treat us, the consumers, with less and less respect and more an more as if we are of no greater value to them than those dreadfully damaged creatures lying around on their stinking bedding.**
Which is to say, to the supermarket chains, them chickens are just like us! Items to be managed productively. Or do I mean destructively?

*In fact I always buy free range chicken these days. For once I do put my money where my mouth is. And what's more, it's a lot cheaper from the local butcher than it is in the supermarkets.
**While they can't move freely, as they're packed into their barns like feathery maggots, they are expected to keep getting up to feed. Any that are unable to get up and stumble over to the feeding posts are culled. Er, because they aren't going to be economical to rear. Somebody has to wade through them daily to hoick out the incapables and break their necks.
Oh and when the (precisely timed) day comes for slaughtering, they have to starve for eight hours to empty their guts. The good side to this is that they get eight hours darkness and therefore a full eight hours rest for the first time in their lives. So the condemned chickens may not get a hearty breakfast but at least they get a bit of a lie in. Oops. I seem to be getting a bit concerned about chicken welfare here. But then think about it. If the supermarkets could, wouldn't they prefer us to shop than to sleep? Wouldn't they love it if we ate all day and certainly, wouldn't they be unhappy if we were unable to waddle out to them to do our shopping? Is there some kind of poetic injustice going on here?

This lovely little pastoral scene came from one of my folders, appropriately entitled
Cock
and baubles:)
And here are some sheep. And lambs.
Oof! That was tiring. I'm off to sleep and preferably not to dream. I think I may lay off the TV watching for a while. It's all too serious in there. It would be nice if tomorrow morning was a bit like this :)