Oh Pooh!

Dead Chicks Make Pilots Swoon

AUSTRALIAN Customs and Civil Aviation authorities recently informed Australian chicken breeders that day-old chicks could not be carried in passenger planes.

Since the war a lucrative trade in day-old chicks has been built up be tween Australian breeders and the Pacific Islands—and even with places as far afield as India and Hongkong.

They have travelled in passenger planes to avoid possible off-loading from freight-planes.

The ban was originally imposed on a recommendation of the Air line Pilots’ Association—one chicken might die and the smell could dis turb the passengers of cause a pilot to become sick and lose control of the plane, they said.

The APA does not object to chickens being carried in freight planes. Apparently the pilots of freighter - planes have stronger stomachs.

QEA Ltd., however, continued to carry chicks until the advent of a prohibition by Australian Customs Dept, on humanitarian grounds.

It is a sad reflection on the state

of the nation that when any body of workers becomes “organised,” ser vice to the public becomes of secondary importance and petty bans are imposed on all and sundry just for the sake of imposing them.

This ban on chickens might, as yet, only be a funny story, but it seems a long way back now to the days of the pioneer bush pilots who carried anything from pigs to gold dust and human freight, all in the one compartment, and landed on any piece of ground that was reasonably

free of tall timber. If there was any swooning to be done then it was not done by the pilots.

LATER : We have now been in formed that the Customs ban on day-old chicks travelling by plane has also been lifted—it has been proved that the chicks huddle to gether for warmth and keep happy.

Mr. G. G. Shepheard, organising teacher at Rarotonga, Cook Islands, has been appointed headmaster-in charge, Niue Island schools.