Day 52: 5 Minute Freewrite - Prompt: the taste of chicken

At a Research Laboratory near Memphis, Tennessee scientists were using new gene splicing technology to try to solve the problem of chickens dying of common diseases due to years of overuse of antibiotics in their food. It was feared that a plague would one day appear and wipe out the entire population of chickens from the planet. The team decided that the Black Vulture known more commonly as a Buzzard, would be the best specimen to splice in with Chicken DNA to create a super desease resistant hybrid. The Vulture after all dined regularly on all manner of carrion with no ill effects.

The team worked on the project for about a year and were nearing success when the worst case scenario for chickens presented itself. Suddenly a huge portion of the food chain was in jeopardy of extinction as they began to rapidly die off all over the world by the millions from a new strain of bird flu. There was no longer time available for careful testing and studies, they needed a viable new creature that could take the place of chickens in the food chain and be resistant to this new strain of flu. They had successfully spliced the gene codes on one single bird that had survived, and it was one of the ugliest creatures that any of them had ever seen. The body and wings looked mostly like a fairly normal rooster, but the neck, legs, head, and feet looked like a Buzzard.

The team frantically went out in the countryside gathering up all of the hens that they could find which were not already sick hoping that the new bird was not sterile and that it could actually fertilize an egg. The results were a complete success and they ended up with a wide variety of different and new breeds of chickens. All of the other chickens in the world succumbed to the disease, eventually, even the birds that had been brought into the facility and mated with the hybrid Vulture-Chicken. Everyone was excited that at least they had managed to save some form of chickens to replace the gaping hole in the worlds food chain.

But it did not take long to find out that the meat on these new birds was completely different than that of a chicken, no one knew before the work was in progress what a Vulture tasted like, but they now believed that this was probably what they had been missing and no one was happy about it. These new birds acted more like a Buzzard than they did a chicken sometimes, and more like a chicken at other times. The facts were evident, the taste of chicken had been lost forever. There would be no more finger-licking-good meals involving chickens. In fact, they were not sure that the results of all of their hard work would even be eaten by anything other than similar carrion eaters like possums and pigs.

The moral of this story is that you can't mess with Mother Nature without there being some consequences. One day we are likely to reap the rewards of what we are now sowing through all of our experiments and changing things out of their natural order. So if one day you happen to see a funny looking bird that some are calling a Buzzchick or a Vulcrow, you will know that you are looking at a living example that my words are true.
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Disclaimer: I often use the freewrite prompt to tell a story instead of doing a pure freewrite, so they sometimes take longer than 5 minutes and usually have some editing. But I try to do my story straight through at one sitting without any unnecessary breaks.

Graphic by: Giphy.com

Prompt: the taste of chicken
Set your timer for 5 minutes.
Start writing
Use the hashtag #freewrite
Publish your piece (include a link to this post if you wish)
Copy and paste your URL into the comment section of the prompt post.
Or, if you don't want to publish your freewrite, just copy and paste as a comment under the prompt post.
If you don't know what a freewrite is, here is a link to the introduction post.

Thank you @mariannewest