Since before 2000 BC, the ugly practice of cockfighting has attracted humans with a taste for gambling and blood. On July 26th, however, Shelton, Connecticut police seized 150 canaries, $8,000 and charged 19 people with bird-fighting.
I have always thought canaries to be the most docile of fowl. They sing. They chirp. Tweedy Bird was a canary. The little yellow birds saved miners lives below the surface detecting dangerous gases. Scientists use them for things we don’t want to know about. But fighting? That is like laying bets on the odds of one firefly electrocuting another.
Pet canaries get a little tense during mating season. In this case, 100 birds were fighting and people were putting money on which ones would live. I don’t have to say how sad and sick this is, but it is not surprising.
Humans like to watch and wager on any kind of fight – roosters, dogs and other humans. With this in mind, perhaps we should up our game and start cubical fighting.
Since we have become a culture of angry, back-stabbing people jammed into cubes, doing monotonous, often soul-numbing work, why not take a break in the afternoon, maybe around 3pm, and just beat the hell out of each other?
I’m not advocating violence at work, but cube farms breed animosity between co-workers like captive canaries during breeding season. And who doesn’t love a good fight? How often have you wanted to throwdown on that guy four cubes down? Don’t lie.
Those two women near the windows have hated each other for years. Give them a shot at settling the score right there between the file cabinets.
This is where the announcer’s voice echos: “It’s managers versus minions in the best two-out-of-three, tag team corporate slugfest! 3 pm, be there!”
If we have the inhumanity to sanction fights between canaries in cages, why not people in cubes? My money is on that dude in the headset with the picture of Chuck Norris thumb-tacked to his neck-high wall.