Breakfast Quesadilla

So this morning I was standing by the stove picking last night’s chicken to add to my quesadilla when, naturally, my thoughts began to drift to the living animal this carcass once was. I’ve raised chickens, eaten their eggs, and slaughtered them with a killing cone and then prepared them for dinner. Home grown chickens taste nicer than this one I was picking which we picked up at Publix last night. Did you know the Norwegian word for chicken is kylling? I bet that would be a cool name for a band. Anyway, as I was picking the chicken my thoughts drifted to other animals that feast on carrion: vulture, condors, thunderbirds — things of that sort. All us mammals have an inherent fear of shadows passing above us because those are the little furry fellas who lived to be our ancestors, but the carrion eaters eat things that are already dead. Or at least they used to. Since humans crossed the Bering land bridge during the last glacial maximum the Americas have been undergoing a mass extinction which quickly extinguished the megafauna — lions, elephants, etc. that managed to coevolve just fine with us in Africa but couldn’t handle the accelerated introduction here. And, yes, I fall squarely into the Paul Martin camp of those extinctions being anthropogenic. The Yangtze river dolphin is just the latest in a long line. And without all the megafauna wandering around North America, dying, and leaving tasty corpses for carrion birds, the carrion birds got into trouble. The California Condor skirted extinction and almost winked out. Zoos saved them. They were reintroduced into the wild. And what saved them? The cattle industry. Big, dead animals to eat. Animals from the genus bos. And then I thought, man, this quesadilla is going to taste like a boss! Even though it’s kylling.