20milesfromnowhere's Blog

The Whole Chicken

“Dad! Dad hurry! He ate it, he ate the whole chicken! That cat ate the whole chicken!”  

This was the chorus I heard coming from the kitchen.  I turned the corner to see the children, quite animated and fidgeting about, pointing at the floor and totally astonished.  Their eyes fixed on our old Tom cat.

Often on Sunday evenings, my darling wife will bake a chicken or make a roast for us to have for the next day’s dinner or to make sandwiches through the week. This particular Monday evening, I had pulled a beautifully baked chicken out of the fridge, carved off several slices and made a very nice meal.  Afterwards, the kids wanted to go outside to play a bit and before joining them I removed the chicken from the foil lined pan used to cook it and placed the remainder into a more suitable container for refrigerating the leftovers. 

 As I removed the bird, a portion of the skin stuck to the foil leaving a vague outline where it had been. The kids had watched me prepare the meal and when they left the room, the chicken was still in the pan.  When they returned, there was the old cat, licking at the pan and looking back at them like, well, like the cat that ate the canary. Instead of a canary however, this cat (it appeared to them) had eaten a whole oven stuffer!

 I looked at the kids, still wide eyed and just waiting for me to go after the rascal. Then I looked at that “stupid cat”, (A pet name I have for him for various reasons) Sitting there, quite fat and happy, licking his paws and staring back at me with a gaze that cats employ from time to time to say, “yeah, I did it and I am proud of it!” I could not help but fall into a fit of laughter. I chuckled until I almost cried, and every time I tried talk, I would look back at the scene and become overwhelmed with the silliness of it all.

Finally I regained my composure, I asked the kids if they were sure this was true? They were quite convinced about what they thought they saw . I could tell they were more than a little perplexed (and maybe a bit perturbed) that I found this so funny.  It was not until I had pointed out that the chicken weighed about 5 pounds and the cat only about 8 pounds and that there was no way that cat could have eaten the whole chicken at one sitting did they start to back off.

We went on to discuss what that cat might have looked like had he consumed 5 pounds of chicken to illustrate the point a bit further. But you know, although they shook their heads in agreement after this discussion, I don’t think that they were completely convinced until I opened the fridge and showed them the stored chicken. 

This little story is one of our family’s favorites because it was so incredibly funny at the time.  It is one of my own personal favorites because it illustrates how easy it is to see what we want to see, or to draw a conclusion without actually thinking things through. Regardless of the absurdity of a seven pound cat downing a five pound chicken in one sitting, those kids believed it, and let that belief built on itself until they were unable to look at the situation logically.  I guess you could say they “swallowed the whole chicken”! 

Ok, on second thought, maybe having one presume that he ate the whole chicken is not so unreasonable after all.