Ducks For Fidelity and a Happy Marriage

Rain is pouring in the province again we have to cancel our scheduled visit to the farm. I heard that the fish have grown so much bigger and fatter at the pond, and there are new hatchlings for ducks and chicken. When I opened the fridge a few days ago and saw ducks eggs, I wasn't very happy.

"Why did you harvest ducks eggs? You should have allowed them to hatch!" 

Although duck meat is good (though more fatty and has higher cholesterol than chicken), and the eggs are excellent for salting and making custards, I saw the eggs at our refrigerator shelf as some form of annihilation of a species. Sort of. Because I wanted to see more little ducklings going around the farm tailing the quacking mother duck.

Before my wedding last year, I researched on Eastern traditions on weddings and keeping happy marriages. I stumbled upon a Korean and a Chinese wedding belief that the couple must at least be gifted with a pair of ducks - ceramic or wood or real- so that they can stay with each other for longer periods of time (like ducks do?) and come home to each other (like ducks do?) all the time. I received no duck pairs on my wedding.

 But ducks or no ducks, I am happily hitched and faithful to my spouse. Yes. Of course.

The Propagation of Species

"IN the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay."

                – Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.

Source

Cats and Dogs

 

What else could be more relaxed?