Only In China #2

I dug into my e-mail archives for this, which I have been saving for about a year and a half. I first read it on Yahoo! but below is the way that Reuters reported the story all the way back on September 10, 2007:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Think a bottle of mineral water might have poisoned you? Then test it on a chicken.

One Chinese family on the southern island province of Hainan had just that idea when one of their number started vomiting blood after drinking a bottle of water, a newspaper said.

They fed the luckless chicken the rest of the water to see what would happen, the Beijing News said, citing a report in a local paper. "The result was the chicken died within a minute," it said, showing a picture of a man holding a plastic bottle squatting over the crumpled body of the bird.

The province's authorities were investigating, it added.

Why would something like this only happen in China? Well, for one reason, most people in the U.S. are terrified by PETA. But it's not like chickens have the greatest prospects to begin with. This is just about their only other option:


And I would much rather donate my body to science than to some drunk college kid on Wing Wednesday only to be washed down by a cheap pint of Natty Light served by Patty, the waitress with extra long fingernails and a smoker's rasp.