CLEO IS SOLID PROOF THAT GIRLS CAN INDEED HAVE IT ALL

SOME of life’s most salient lessons can be learned from animals.

Take my chook, Cleopatra. We have two hens, Cleo and Muriel, fine specimens, good layers, wyandottes, one gold, one silver.

Golden girl Cleo recently went clucky and refused to leave the nest, not even for her usual walkabouts over the fence with Muriel (I have no idea where in heck those chooks go, but they are free range in the truest sense).

Anyway, Cleo had decided her gallivanting days were over, it was time to settle down and start a family.

If she had been able to speak human, I feel sure she would have told me that her biological clock was ticking and she was no spring chicken.

She was also probably tired of being a working woman. There must be more to life than producing the ingredients for omelettes and souffles. The drudgery, the pressure, no room for promotion.

Sure, maybe she couldn’t have it all, career and motherhood, but life was too short to ponder maybes.

Cleo’s only problem was there were no suitable males for her to start a brood.

In fact it, there were no males within cock-a-doodle do.

We had a rooster once (that is, one of our hens turned out not to be a hen after all). But Lenny made a bit too much noise for inner Melbourne and had to be returned to the farm.

So lonely Cleopatra pined away. If only there had been roosters living nearby, we could have organised a poultry Bachelorette show.

Would she pick the handsome, rakish, devil-maycare leghorn or the more sensitive and thoughtful australorp? Perhaps the dandy dapper silkie?

After all, she was a good prospect, a fine-looking female, financially independent, she had her own home (split-level), she was intelligent.

So we thought we would get Cleo some young’uns. We bought four day-old chicks, placed them under her one dark night and she woke to an instant family.

She quickly became the proud mother, sauntering about the pen with adoring chicks in tow, teaching them the finer arts of chookdom, such as scratching for worms.

The chicks began to grow, at an alarming rate. It is a cliche to say children seem to grow every day, but chicks actually do. They seem to get bigger by the hour, by the minute.

Now the chicks have reached a fair size, a curious thing has happened. Cleo has returned to her wild, reckless ways, flying over the fence for a girls’ day out with Muriel, just like the old days. Two crazy chicks on the town, footloose and fancy free range.

She leaves the youngsters to fend for themselves and they don’t seem to mind.

The lesson of this story? Ladies, you can have it all. Career, motherhood, fun times with the girls. And who needs a bloke?

Another lesson. The Bachelorette is not the cheapest, most degrading, demeaning insult to humanity on Australian TV.

We now have Bride and Prejudice.