Microsoft Chicken Soup for the Soul

Microsoft Chicken Soup for the Soul

By: Erreh Svaia

“It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Bill Gates

No, this time it wasn't the wildly amusing Anthony Bourdain, or the hot headed sheer brilliance of Gordon Ramsey, it turns out that Microsoft mastermind and the world's wealthiest man (and biggest philanthropist), Bill Gates, a man with brilliant talent for recommending awesome books, is now recommending us a delirious "out of the box" recipe for fighting extreme poverty in Africa and perhaps, the world.

Honestly, my first thought about this, was that it was a crazy joke, after all, Gates seems to be a guy with a vivid sense of humor for a billionaire, he accepted the Ice Bucket Challenge in a funny and creative way, and his advice on little odd but brilliant books is remarkable, so it wasn't hard not to take him so seriously at first, but he is totally serious about this, and it tends to have its interesting logic, if not too accurate.

Poultry, and specifically chicken are the main element on Gates proposal, based on the fast and simple reproductive cycle of these animals seems to be the main driver here, considering that while beef cycle is too similar to humans, pork takes like 3 months to deliver its hatchlings, but talking about chicken you can expect to have up to 300 little chicken a year, beginning with a couple of these animals, so as growth almost appear to be exponential, Gates premise doesn't look so erratic if a little naive, considering also low costs of feeding them, the small space they occupy and the relative ease to handle them, again the pros seems to out weight the cons.

Everything looks fine and wonderful to that point, even considering that women at home can handle the breeding of chickens alone while men works outside, nearly doubling a house income, or the use of chicken eggs for self-feeding is also wonderful, considering the of source of protein eggs are, but the down slide on Gates premise has to do with chicken disease, specially bird flu, considering that Gates initiative is aimed at small, poor African homes, in which your bet there won't be enough security measures to hold a possible outbreak on avian influenza, imagine an Africa flooded with chickens in almost every poor house, Gates has a point here, birds vaccines are cheap, but Gates initiative should cone also with a good education in health measures, considering that in poor homes with bad sanity care is a proper place for disaster.

Also another important thing here is contention, in a case of an outbreak, how would you contain the disease? Considering that contagion from animal to human has been documented happening to people working close with those animals, how closer it can be that having them at your own house? Is Gates considering this? Is he also considering that without proper containment is easy for a common bird to infect chickens and vice versa practically taking the disease everywhere in a large ratio, just consider the seriousness of this situation that hit China hard a couple of years ago and that months ago affected the North American poultry industry.

Gates idea undoubtedly was a good one, but is also a risky bet, it could initially turn into something marvelous but without proper instructions, restrictions and health considerations it could turn into a bomb growing in an exponential way, in the meantime I could give a couple of chickens in exchange for some millions of his dollars, I'm sure he will recover them fast.