The farms nurtured. They bore fruits and extended to each man an affiliation limited only by his talent, his dexterity, and his enthusiasm and aptitude for labour. For Smokie Joe and his kin, a yearning had been roused and conquered. But for us animals and our kith, life proposed no such promise or connection. We came from the wrong places, the forests, the wilderness; we came strapping, fervent, penetrating and unrefined.
The farms declined our offers and we took refuge back into the woodlands, along water points and underground abodes. We re-organised and cut deals with sons of men. We traded the use of our brute force and our sinewy muscles for food and security. We tilled farms and dragged carriages, we laid eggs and produced milk, and in hushed harassment and aggrieved arrogance, we desired, and endured in quest for our own dream; that we could live in liberty, finally, and rise to welcome life with might and majesty or suchlike simplicity, life could accord.
And there were hard battles and so were sweet victories, fortifying the communal might of the Animal Revolution. We fought and tasted triumphs, tackling a new dream that consumed equality and allegiance as its energy. We were kings, and life was promising, bursting, and blooming. The calves, lambs and chicks of change that would make our generation a cringing, cowering, subdued, and pacific generation had not yet been conceived.
Well, that’s gone with the wind now. It’s an animal dream crushed, and just half a chicken century after the glorious Animal Revolution. Neighbouring farms, earlier on liberated, have been lost back to the descendants of Smokie Joe, who now dominate the landscape with might and power. Ask Dog—never has he felt so servile in his life than to Smokie Joe. He only has to see his pipe on his desk to feel undersized. He has only to smell his cigar and he gets timid like a mare—even now when he looks at his boots, stepping on that the gas pedal, taking us for a ride, so flexible and springy, he feels his heart sinking, as they say, into his paws.
Mine too, that’s why I sometimes plant my chicken shit right inside those boots, accidentally of course, as poetic justice. I guess, it’s those old, biased ‘accepted wisdom’ fed into us as young pups and chicks. Dog has sleepless nights (for our sake) thinking up ways to ruin Smokie Joe without being found out. Perhaps cut the brake cables of his truck, but then, we almost always ride in it and that would spell doom for all of us.
His three boys toil too, on the farm, and the two girls hide in the kitchen, perfecting skills, as plain Janes do (sad but true), being useful only in culinary arts and in housekeeping for what they lack in looks. Smokie Joe has to look at himself in the mirror to know where they got their deficient looks—and perhaps their dexterity. And as the boys hanker after bean-stalk cutes in short-skirts that can’t boil tea, they rust on the shelf. Sometimes at night around the kitchen table, they help the servants shell French beans; their wages, after powder for their dull faces, can’t even keep me in shoelaces, assuming I have shoes. Poor girls! Poor servants! They are just like the rest of us animals.
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