It’s hard to keep chooks these days what with the price of real estate. Your average chook shed would use up a few million dollars of inner city espace and besides the neighbors are ready for protest, fresh from shutting down every live music venue in earshot. My grandad had chooks, I do not. This is a sure sign of the decadence of our age.

Here you see Grandad Ellard, eldest brother and chooks. Cat is optional. When viewing chooks, you wear a hat. I was not even born, and saw no such chooks.

Even by the time I was born, you were hard pressed to have chooks. You made do with less interesting substitutes.

Even the quality of image has decayed since the golden age. I can assure you that these were not good layers. Of eggs, that is.

Pigs are about the closest things to chooks that the 70′s had to offer, in fact when I think of the 70s pigs are prominent in the vision, along with fondue and Woody Allen. You could still have a shed, and they were about as bright but no one was really fooled. I’m extremely jealous of the missus who was close friends with a hen all the way up to the 1980s. Apparently you didn’t have to wear a hat to view chooks in the United States, this is probably something related to judge’s wigs.

My parents had a really weird idea of household pets.

When I go back through the family photos and see pets like ‘Slimy’ and ‘Instant Death’, I’m always aware that other kids had pets you could hug. My first pet was a turtle. I think it got absorbed by one of the others.

But at least I know about pets. When you ask the kids these days about chicken wire they tell you it’s for reinforcing sculptures. That would be sculpture wire. I ask them why it’s called chicken wire and they get that look like you unfriended them. They think chicken is something that comes in korma and why is it in their sculpture o.m.g.? One even sniffed the plaster to see if it was chicken flavoured.

I might be off the mark but it seems to me that part of the problem in the world is that as the number of household chooks has declined, the number of bad things in the world has risen (you could draw a graph). This causes things like the Batman mass murder shooting, Tony Abbot and YouTube comments. If people had a hat and chooks to look at they wouldn’t be so upset all the time. I’m going to write to Melinda Gates and suggest this could be a cheap way to make things better.