Lady is yet to learn how awful human beings can be. She’s only been alive a year now, and not familiar with history. That is why first and foremost I need to identify a perennial human enemy- FEAR.

Viktor Frankl (video posted in Searching for Copper) suggests imagining the worst-case scenario before you ____________________(fill in your intended plan here). If I fear giving a speech, he posits: It’s not likely people who came to hear you speak are armed and going to shoot if you do a poor job. Right? It’s kind of funny, but it is true. Laughing at fear helps me see -perhaps- I am being ridiculous.

My husband asked me to today when I updated him on Lady’s progress: “Isn’t Copper…dead?”

“Yes,” I said, sadly. But Lady doesn’t know that. She’s just a hen. Copper left alive in a box. Who knows where hens go when they’re taken away in box?”

Four hens showed up at my house in a box. The box perhaps lends some mystery to the hen experience. A door, an exit, or passageway to a new place or experience. What world is beyond “the box”? a hen may ask.

Lady, I suspect is already working on these existential questions. Since, well, her time for exiting this world in a box may be coming up. Three hens have already gone through that passage. She knows this is not a safe world: Poor quality food, minimal to no healthcare, hawks, rats to name a few predators.

Either a hen is an engineered creature scientists breed to be plump, egg-laying, and flightless birds; in which case she cannot survive in this world. Or there is something completely wrong with the world- as it is. Or it could be both things happening simultaneously.

If that is the case, we should all be wondering what happens when we get put into that box. We may as well face the BIGGEST FEAR there is, the FEAR of dying.

Once we are free of that fear, all fears will pale by comparison. Hens just don’t emerge out of nowhere then vanish back to nowhere when they die. I am sorry, but the scientists of the twentieth century can’t claim that as a “scientific truth.” That sounds more like an excuse to justify any kind of bizarre experiment they so choose.

“Of course, we can fundamentally change hens into whatever serves our interests! Who says we can’t??”