Thursday, March 3, 2011

Rural Gods II: The Sex-Change Fairy



The Sex-Change Fairy and her peeps Y-Gor and The Mighty ZedWu

Y-Gor and his sister The Mighty ZedWu determine the biological sex, and sometimes socially-constructed gender, of livestock, governing mammals and poultry, respectively.

If the farmer is raising Thanksgiving turkeys for a customer pool who mostly want giant celebratory tom birds to wow the inlaws, ZedWu will arrange for 80% of the "straight-run" poults she bought to be dainty little hens. Y-Gor will will do the same for the beef producer hoping for steer calves from his cows.

But if the farmer is working to build a dairy herd of goats or cattle, or a productive laying flock of chickens, these gender daemons will bless her with a neverending bounty of male offspring.


The farmer who has pinned his herd improvement hopes on a fine and expensive purebred ram or bull or buck may find that he's gone and bought a gay stud. Y-Gor is nothing if not playful.

ZedWu and Y-Gor always aim for balance. If they have blessed your henhouse with an entire hatch of leghorn roosters, you can be sure that your next litter of production pigs will all be gilts. They are nothing if not fair.

If their efforts fail to to impose this balance, the Sex-Change Fairy will step in. Her powers are mostly limited to rabbits (as well as pet rodents) and all poultry.

Save the four does from a litter of meat rabbits, make hassenpfeffer of the bucks, and one month later you are sure to find three of the "does" fighting amongst themselves, trying to bite one another in the ... testicles? Where the hell did those come from? The fourth bunny will be underaged-pregnant by one or all of her new brothers.

Noticing that your hens are looking bedraggled and put-upon, you eat or sell most of your date-raping roosters, drakes, and toms.

Look into the poultry yard a week later. When did that hen turkey start strutti ... is that a beard? Goddammit. Did that pullet just crow? What the ...


When the Sex-Change Fairy does not work her enchantment on the gonads (and combs, hackle-feathers, beards, spurs and attitudes) of your flock, she enlists the help of her corporeal minions, mobilizing the raccoons, owls, and Jack Russell terriers of the world to slaughter only female poultry, preferably those that are sitting on nests.

Being the second in a series of revelations concerning the powerful deities who govern rural life. Iconography by the inimitable Kelly Bahmer-Brouse.

2 comments:

  1. At this point, I am somewhat surprised that there aren't commercially available sperm separation services available. I seem to recall a factoid I read some years ago about X and Y sperm having different motility, and that this could be selected in a centrifuge.

    Something like this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, at 3600 simoleons per vial -- not counting collection and insemination -- those are gonna be some pricey pullets.

    ReplyDelete

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