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PLSO Issue 2, 2016 March/April

9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org FOR THE LIFE OF THE CHICKEN of some psychological principle I heard from Oprah, you cannot love a chicken. But apparently the standard chicken operating system is only for rural chickens (future dinners) and does not apply to much more sophisticated city chickens who more closely resemble Disney characters, or so I’m told. Aer looking at all the options for accommodating Jim, the parties agreed that the best option would be an easement that would expire at the end of the life of the chicken. When I talked to Bob, a colleague of mine, about the chicken easement he suggested that a license would be more appropriate. (Bob is not his real name. His real name is John atcher but John wisely decided he didn’t want anything to do with a chicken easement so I will respect his wishes and not mention him at all.) Warning! Educational content ahead! e dierence between a license and an easement is that a license is a contract between specic individuals over the use of a piece of land and an easement is a contract for the use of a piece of land that runs with the land. I immediately rejected the idea of a license because, well, because of Chicken Easement! I mean, who cares about a contract that isn’t going to get led and be a part of the permanent deed records of Multnomah County when you can be the proud author of the Chicken Easement. See what I’m getting at? How many people in the entire state, and possibly the entire country, and maybe even the entire world, and probably even the entire universe have ever written and led a chicken easement? No one has to my knowledge. It would be a rst in the history of land surveying. is is going to be my Magnum Opus, the greatest work of my career, the dening moment that would distinguish me from all of the other surveyors on the planet. e cruel world could take everything else away from me but I would still be the world’s rst and foremost expert on chicken easements. So a chicken easement needs to be written and the descriptive language is something any surveyor can write, but the real tricky part is how to uniquely describe a chicken so that everyone would know exactly which chicken needed to die before the easement was extinguished. I suppose that the legal description of the chicken itself needed to have the same standards of care that were required for a legal description for the land. It had to unambiguously describe one and only one chicken. Conceivably, the Pisiczks, their heirs, successors, and/or assigns could sneak in a counterfeit chicken if they just weren’t feeling it in terms of moving the chicken coop, and really, how hard can it be to uniquely describe a chicken? As it turns out, really, really hard. According to the Internet, there are roughly 50 billion chickens pecking their way out of a shell every year. If the average chicken has a lifespan of 6 to 12 years, we are looking at somewhere between 300 billion to 600 billion chickens on this planet. Since half are hens and half are roosters, that narrows it down to 150 billion to 300 billion roosters. Jim also happens to be a Rhode Island Red which also reduces the number down to around 300 million. So at this point, we are nowhere near getting the number down to one unique chicken and I am running out of ideas. Time to call in the experts. e phone call went something like this: “American Poultry Foundation. How may I help you?”. “anks for taking my call, I am a land surveyor and I need to precisely and uniquely describe a single chicken for an easement. I am wondering if there is some system for identifying chickens.” Click. Dang, must have gotten disconnected, lucky I have speed dial. “American Poultry Foundation. How may I help you?” “I am sorry we must have been disconnected, I was asking about describing and identifying a single chicken.” “See here mister, I can see through your shenanigans. You aren’t fooling anyone. We know you are from the American Beef Federation and we are tired of your pranks. Chickens are still a valuable commodity, even if you can buy one for $2.15 at the Cackle Hatchery. (True story). Just because we don’t brand chickens doesn’t mean we are inferior to the cattle industry so we can do without your constant harassment and condescension! Good bye and stop calling us and wasting our time!” Click. Dang. at didn’t go as well as I had hoped it would. I guess I am on my own on this one. Perhaps a call to the Pisiczks would be useful. Mrs. Pisiczk did oer one nugget of information, Cogburn was named Cogburn because he walked like John Wayne. Okay, that is denitely going into the description, or it least it was until I checked out videos on YouTube of John Wayne walking and chickens walking and it soon became obvious that all chickens walk like John Wayne. at was no help at all. A phone call to the County Recorder let me know that ngerprinting the chicken or a photograph of the chicken was not possible because of concerns for reproduction quality. Another dead end so where does one go from here? Nowhere. at is where it went. I got the phone call no one wanted to receive. Jim had passed on. Mrs. Pisiczks was absolutely sure he was dead. No CPR was given. No resuscitation was attempted. is is truly a catastrophe in line with having a goat eat the Mona Lisa, painting the Sistine a nice neutral beige, or when they wrote in that annoying Scrappy Doo and ruined one of the best television shows in human history. No chicken easement means my moment for surveying greatness was over. ere will never be another opportunity like that in my lifetime. A true tragedy. Oh, and Cogburn dying, that was sad, as well. I loved that chicken and he loved me, too.


PLSO Issue 2, 2016 March/April
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