Of Hockey and Chickens

A quiet afternoon. Both on this March 3, 2020 and back in 10,000BC.

GM Braithwaite steps up to the podium to announce his teams first ever major regular season accomplishment, never have they won a division, never have they won a conference, never have they won the league. Marking this as the first time for all three to happen. Now bare with me, the comparison will all come together at the end.

GM Braithwaite, proud of his team announces "We locked in first, and we are really proud of our boys, reminds me of the time, back in 10,000 BC, when we began to notice the red jungle fowl(the ancestor of the modern chicken) would spike in population around the time when bamboo shoots lost all their buds, leading us to think we could spike their population by feeding them vast amounts of food, therefore, we would always have egg laying machines and delicious things that taste like...apparently everything, lying around everywhere. This was great news.

Over the years the chicken proved to be an excellent animal to domesticate, as there are very few animals who we were actually able to domesticate before the common era, maybe only a bakers dozen.

Domestication is different from taming, and involves the catching, breeding, and engineering of the animal to suit our needs over the course of many generations.

The requirements for domestication follow the 4 F's
1) an animal must be FRIENDLY, we cannot domesticate tigers as they will kill us all

2) an animal must be Fuc....FECUND(likes to breed rapidly) It is easier to domesticate a pig who has offspring for our purposes quickly, than a Panda...who for some reason won't get on with it...pandas are dick heads

3) an animal must be FEEDABLE. 5 pounds of grass is something we cannot eat, but feed 5 pounds of grass to a cow and we get 1 pound of cow, we can eat that. feed five pounds of cow to a tiger and we get 1 pound of tiger...a bad trade off. Making the cow the better animal for domestication.

4) the last thing an animal needs is a sense of FAMILY values and social hierarchy. We can domesticate horses by becoming the head horse, you cannot domesticate zebras as they do not have a head of the group. You take one horse and you control the family, you take 1 zebra and you have 1 zebra.

Now, to understand why this relates to hockey we must take a look at #4 family values, the red jungle fowl had a social hierarchy, where they would constantly pluck away at each other for a chance to advance in the society. Humans were able to take advantage of this and dominate that one red jungle fowl taking control of the whole family.

This behaviour can still be seen in chickens today, who pluck away at each other all day, every day, attempting to be the top chicken...But do you know who's really top chicken?

THE EDMONTON FUCKING OILERS ARE TOP CHICKEN