On the pecking order.

My downstairs neighbors have a small menagerie in the front yard. Chickens. Ducks. Rabbits. People walking by often stop and marvel. The whole scene is rather exotic for the industrial east side. Edenic almost.

Almost.

I have always had a vague idea in my head of the pecking order. Of social dominance established by the beak. But relentless brutality is the only way I can describe the behavior I have witnessed, without any seeming concern over food or mate.

It is hard not to anthropomorphize here. [Sadisitic.]

Or make the scene representative of some larger world view that it could not possibly sustain. [A world made of stone.]

But looking at a chicken as it is pinned to the ground and pecked, unyielding and without mercy, invoked the image of a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.