San Francisco's Unusual Ban -- No Tic Tac Toe for Chickens

I am brushing up on all of the podcasts I've downloaded, and this morning, while driving to school, I listened to This American Life's Poultry Slam.  I believe it was from Thanksgiving time, and it was wholly focused on poultry.  The first story was about a capital case defense attorney trying to argue that her mentally retarded and clinically insane client should not be executed because he could not understand what that meant  (in fact, he thought he was going to be reupholstered).  The State's psychiatrist who testified that the inmate understood what an execution meant explained her logic by saying that she played tic tac toe with the inmate and he won.  The defense attorney immediately thought of chickens at southern county fairs that play tic tac toe, and she tried to get the chicken admitted to rebut the psychiatrist's testimony.  Well, the defense attorney was not permitted to enter the chicken in evidence, in any capacity, and the inmate was not executed, but later, San Francisco actually developed a wacky little ordinance that banned chickens from playing tic tac toe because of the government interest in preventing animal cruelty.

Want to read more?  Check it out:  This American Life -- Chicken Tic Tac Toe


p.s.  the two other stories in the podcast are definitely worth hearing:  one is on Tom the Turkey, who terrorized Martha's Vineyard and was eventually shot by the police; and the other is on raising geese naturally for them to naturally produce foie gras.