By Margaret Kamba 

There is a natural punitive system that I witnessed this holiday. It happened unexpectedly and made me think of the magnificent way that animals punish each other and wished it could happen naturally for humans too.

I had previously bought my mother some offlayers so that she could grow her own eggs and the seven chickens have been doing pretty well for her.

It was this Easter holiday that I thought I needed to add more chickens and perhaps add a variety to her collection. Fortunately, I found someone selling some road runners and thought this would be a great idea.

I thought if I would also add more layers and so I bought two layers. Fortunately the cage has three layers which can allow for the separation of the birds.

It was only three hours that I had put the two layers with the others that chaos began. There was a lot of perking of the two birds it actually became a bloody scene. 

It was only when my mother told me that she had seen one of the birds eating an egg that I understood the problem.

The other birds were literally having a field day on the two chickens that they had to find survival tactics. 

One took its head out of the cage so the others could not bite it. The other sat in a corner and did not move at all or risk being bitten.

Forgive my lack of experience in this field but the two "naughty" chickens just had to meet their fate much to the uproar of my children who felt the chickens needed a separate place to breed from.

It got me an opportunity to explain to the children that if one exhibits a bad behavior such as stealing or taking things without asking, then they would meet such fate.

A deeper kind of brainstorming was on what the chicken kingdom had done to discipline its own thieves.

It was harsh perhaps but the rulers of the chicken kingdom would not have any indiscipline. It was that or else all of them would be destined for the pot. 

I am sure in their mind they were thinking of how two strangers were coming to turn their world upside down just like that. 

It might have also been just being inhospitable and framing the two strangers so that they are simply chucked out.

I can't put a finger onto it but all I know is that when the strangers had left, there was calm and quiet as though nothing had ever happened.

Imagine if our human system was just like that. Ruthlessly uprooting the social ills of our society and straightening things. 

Our society is filled with so much evil it has become very hard to trust anyone with fathers raping daughters, wives killing husbands, fraud, dishonesty and so many other evils.

When we look to nature and see how much it comes to instill discipline, we must understand that our values of ubuntu/hunhu are what should ultimately guide us. Only those who have ears have heard.