Not calling anybody a dumb cluck, but…

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." Mark Twain

It was likely the first philosophic conundrum any of us grappled with. As early as first grade we theorized, speculated, and disagreed: Which came first the chicken or the egg…

Well it appears that a consensus of evolutionary biologists have offered the ultimate definitive answer – since the hard, shelled egg was a critical prerequisite to the evolution of full-time land dwelling vertebrates, and the evolution of innumerable species of land-dwelling vertebrates preceded the emergence of Gallus gallus domesticus, the egg necessarily came before the chicken.

But across the country, farmers, wholesalers, grocers, restauranteurs, and hungry folks at the breakfast table emphatically disagree…until, and unless, you have a chicken, you’re not gonna have an egg…

And right now, it appears we’re running seriously short of chickens.

That does seem to be an odd observation to make, chickens being the most populous bird on the planet, with upwards of 27 billion clucking and pecking across the face of the earth. But there’s a catch, not all chickens are egg-laying chickens – boy chickens, of course, are out of the egg laying business from the get-go, and whole breeds of birds are designed to simply eat, die, and be eaten, laying eggs only for the purpose the Good Lord intended – to make more chickens, Denver omelets be damned. That leaves us with laying hens – essentially feathered egg factories, well over 300 million of them in the U.S. alone.

But that number is dropping … fast … and that poses some serious, mayhap even life-threatening problems.

No, I haven’t suddenly developed a fascination with barnyard ornithology. It’s said that the outcome of American politics hinges on “kitchen table issues,” or , in this case, breakfast table issues.

The problem comes down to two words – bird flu. More specifically, H5N1 Avian Influenza. If you’re raising chickens and the flu gets to the flock – every chicken in the chicken barn dies, either from the flu or is euthanized to prevent the bug from spreading to the chickens across the road. How many chickens? According to available reports – more than 17 million in November and December, with another 14 million or so last month, and the carnage continues.

Not one of those dead chickens is laying her daily egg, but every morning Americans are still sitting down to two, over easy, with toast and bacon. The growing gap between supply and demand has done a number on prices. In 2021, before H5N1, the average wholesale price of a dozen eggs hovered around $1.75 – at the end of this January that wholesale price sat at a low of $7.03 in the Midwest up to $8.72 out in California. If you’ve been buying eggs for less than that, your grocer is likely eating part of the cost of your breakfast … how long he’ll have an appetite for that is anybody’s guess.

What I do know is that that bastion of the great southern breakfast – Waffle House, with 1,900 locations in 25 states, cracking more than 272 million eggs a year – has slapped a 50 cent per egg surcharge on every menu item requiring the cook to crack an egg. It used to be folks would take a pass on the steak and eggs ‘cuz they couldn’t afford the steak – now it’s the eggs…

Now laying hens aren’t Democrats and a virus doesn’t vote, so keeping the promise made by The Current Occupant to bring down the cost of eggs if elected may get a little complicated. Let’s just say, if Elon Musk doesn’t come up with a way for AI to crank out hen fruit or discover a limitless stash of cackleberries on Mars, there’ll be hell to pay on Pennsylvania Avenue.

My best advice to the Very Stable Genius, forget about Gaza and Greenland, take over someplace with a whole lot of chicken coops because egg prices are expected to go up by another 20 percent or so as the flu bug continues to spread.

What’s worse, this new flu is not only spreading to chickens, turkeys and geese – milk cows are coming down with their own variant and passing that along to the folks who milk, feed, and are otherwise intimate with the bovine population on a regular basis. Oh, one other thing, so far about 1,000 people have caught this new strain of bird flu, according to the World Health Organization. About half of those people died from it.

Now this would seem to be the time for an all-hands-on-deck push to come up with a vaccine to put the kibosh on H5N1 in man, beast, and bird … but one thing is for damn sure, Robert “Mice in the Blender” Kennedy is no Dr. Fauci. There’s a new sign over the entrance of the CDC: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The new administration’s reaction to the World Health Organization warning? Quit the World Health Organization.

Yeah, things are rarely so bad that they can’t get worse.

The first reported American death from H5N1 was January 6, 2025. The first reported American death from COVID 19 was February 6, 2019.

History rhymes?