Many of my friends these days are packing. They\u2019ve got permits and they\u2019re armed and ready. Several of them are going to the Pheasant Sanctuary with shotguns. It\u2019s the story of my life but I can\u2019t help but think of myself as the pheasant in this tale.<\/p>\n
I want to meet the brilliant guy who first decided to call Pheasantville, a Sanctuary. I bet if you asked every single pheasant there, not a single one would have picked that word. Sanctuary, my ass. A refuge? A holy place? And get this, \u201ca place where wildlife is protected.\u201d<\/p>\n
My friends are kind and considerate people. They really don\u2019t want to cause the pheasants too much pain. The kind and considerate thing to do, they insist, is to blow their heads off. By using shotgun shells with hundreds of little ball-bearing-like pellets you can aim in the general direction of the bird and somehow some of these pellets will do the trick.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I have been birdsitting and lately I wake up to the sounds of tweets \u2013 real tweets and chirps, not Twitter tweets. Coming from two cockatiels, Eli and Calypso, and a Quaker parrot named Vladimir.<\/p>\n
After you\u2019ve had three birds sitting on your arms and shoulders, or watching football with you, you have a whole new perspective on the issue of blowing off the heads of birds. Now I love roast beef and pork ribs and pastrami, so I already know I\u2019m a hypocrite. But it just takes having Vladimir say \u201cgoodmorning\u201d at six-thirty on your way to shave to reevaluate the way these things are done.<\/p>\n
It just seems a bit unfair. You pay a bunch of money. You bring your shotgun and your shells and you shoot fifteen birds. None of whom is allowed to shoot back. But what if just once they did. I wrote a folk song, \u201cHe Was A Pheasant Friend Of Mine:\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the story of my pheasant friend, From what I\u2019m told, you can take your dead pheasants home with you, or they\u2019ll dress them for you. Obviously, the same guy who came up with the name \u201cSanctuary\u201d decided on the name \u201cdress.\u201d Like that\u2019s got to be the pheasant\u2019s worst nightmare: wandering around someone\u2019s kitchen stark naked. Never mind the fact that you no longer have a head.<\/p>\n Now I really don\u2019t want to spoil your next pheasant dinner. I don\u2019t particular enjoy it when I\u2019m about to have scrambled eggs and chives when I\u2019m told about how eight thousand chickens live in a two by four feet studio apartment in some small town like Hope, Arkansas.<\/p>\n It\u2019s just that these darn cockatiels and Vladimir are making me soft. I know the right thing to do is man-up and get my permit.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s one more really big problem I have to confront. I really don\u2019t like the idea of going out into the Sanctuary with a bunch of guys who might be thinking about a client who\u2019s been driving them nuts, or about the fight they just had with their girlfriend or wife about the best place to put the peanut butter, or about whether they\u2019d rather be Brad Pitt or Tiger Woods. Usually, this is all really interesting stuff. But when you add shotguns, it seems to me a bit dicey. All I see is a bunch of freaked out birds flying hysterically this way and that, and a bunch of raised shotguns pointing every which way and a bunch of guys each wanting to get to the holy grail of fifteen pheasants. It just doesn\u2019t seem like the perfect place for a paranoid folksinger who just might have an international folk hit in hand.<\/p>\n Altogether now:<\/p>\n This is the story of my pheasant friend, The widows cried, and my friend just fried ____________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n The author wishes to assure his readers that he worked closely with the National Shotgun Association to ensure that not a single hunter was really hurt in the writing of this story. And that he might be packing, and will act forcefully to protect his copyright to \u201cHe Was A Pheasant Friend Of Mine.\u201d <\/p>\n Thursday, December 31, 2009 \u00a9 Mickey Friedman – All Rights Reserved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of my friends these days are packing. They\u2019ve got permits and they\u2019re armed and ready. Several of them are going to the Pheasant Sanctuary with shotguns. It\u2019s the story of my life but I can\u2019t help but think of myself as the pheasant in this tale. I want to meet the brilliant guy who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":5,"menu_order":981,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-58","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P5pvz8-W","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/58\/revisions\/240"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTo the pheasant hunt, he wouldn\u2019t bend.
\nHe found himself a pheasant gun
\nAnd shot some hunters one by one.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nTo the pheasant hunt, he wouldn\u2019t bend.
\nHe found himself a pheasant gun
\nAnd shot some hunters one by one.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nBut this pheasant story has never died.
\n\u2018Cause he found a pheasant gun
\nAnd shot some hunters one by one.<\/p>\n