Chooks:
Jackie French, author of The Chook Book, writes: Re. “When is a cage egg green? When it plants trees” (29 October, item 14).

Jackie’s contribution is so solid in terms of chooks and the science fit that everyone is so urgently flapping about.
She takes me back to my experiences as a kid with Mum’s chooks which integrated eventually with serious global science/medical outcomes DONE by a local Perth boy with a little bit of powerful help (science is weak without a dose of human power often owned by non-scientists) from one of Australia’s most powerful persons (? Public servants/politicians).
Mum’s chooks did it just as Jackie says and were fed home grown Lucerne adding premium taste and yoke colour. As a kid of 5 & 6 I was helping Mum rear them, by 7 & 8 was developing marketing skills selling the eggs as superior product at premium prices in wealthy neighbourhoods, watched them die in swaths from ‘bird flu’, assisted death, burning and burying as ordered by agricultural inspectors and after no chooks for nearly 2 years the bird flu vaccines arrival made me inoculator in chief.
Later in medical school I thought I’d check out this vaccine and then, nearly 4 decades later, just a couple of years ago listened to the extraordinary DIN of pollies, scientists and media frightening the worlds population with the imminent death by ‘bird flu’ (which killed 70 – 80% of people it infected).
Nobody listened to me till Mr ‘power’ decided to believe me, confronted the scientific authorities forcefully claiming a vaccine has existed for 5 decades and with their capitulation the deafening ‘bird flu’ media noise stopped over night.
We were all saved by Mum’s backyard chooks.
About a year later all commercial ventures damaged by the noise abatement invented some piglet disease to re-instate farmyard profitability in big cities.

Richard Hurford thanks for your contribution, Fascinating info.

AIREFUEGO has some basic and essential wisdom that identifies just how many of the ‘experts’ and commenters on this (asylum seekers) immigration issue live inside their own heads rather than the real world with mythical definitions of principle, ethics, rights and values which suit those old, natural human evils - racism, greed, my comfort (f-ck yours) - that possess us all (natural human animals) to a differing extent thank God, and have never gone away although modern evolved sophisticated western man has learnt a game of texts and evidence to prove he’s lost those evils (man’s kidding himself is natural psychological behaviour least understood by psychologists). Both the absence and presence (in whatever degree) of those evils in the human animal have an ancient record - yes, record recorded.

Jackie French, author of The Chook Book

The spectre of a giant mass of tuned-in coloured people - just waiting for news that Australia treats humans like humans - before invading us in a million floating inner tubes, eskies and rickety boats is one which anti-refugee advocates love to conjure up.

Fact is, Tamils are already heading here. Guess what - the floodgates that you fear are already open. They have been for years, because nothing material has changed under the last two governments. And guess what else - a tiny trickle of asylum seekers is indeed making it through the wide open gates. A tiny number we can easily process, and if necessary, accept and absorb into Australia. What are you scared of?

There will be no flood of millions, mostly because getting to Australia is physically hard, expensive and dangerous.

Your suggestion that the only thing keeping refugees away is “poor treatment” is also utterly false. For a start, guess what else. They don’t sell The Australian in Tamil refugee camps. Irrespective of what Rudd (or Tuckey) reckon or the Oceanic Viking does, people-smugglers will tell their clients that all is basically rosy in Australia. Refugees will be treated (mostly) fairly, they will be fed, they will have a new life here, just like the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, the Irish, the Vietnamese… And personally I’m proud that this is true. I’m not scared of it.