A perk to working in North Korean tourism is access to the fascinating literature of the DPRK. Rarely read by foreigners or made available online, we’d like to share some. Here is an unedited excerpt, taken from the book “Anecdotes of Kim Jong Ils Life, Part 1” (2012 Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, DPRK).
“Profound Knowledge of Poultry”
One September day in 1967 Kim Jong Il visited a chicken farm. Some chickens were playing in the recreation area while others were laying eggs in the coops, which were equipped with automatic doors.
An official reported that they were the first batch of fattening chickens that had been hatched from eggs sent to the farm by Kim II Sung. Kim Jong Il, with a satisfactory eye on the plump chickens, praised the farm for having raised the chickens well. Then he looked more closely at one chicken before asking, “Is that a fattener, too? That one pecking nervously at the feed.”
The officials looked in the direction to which he was pointing, and saw a chicken fussing over its feed.
He asked if a laying chicken had got mixed with the fatteners.
No one answered.
With a slight smile on his face, he said, “Fatteners are calm
and never fuss, but laying chickens are nervous by nature.”
Then he commented that it must be an excellent layer.
An official caught the chicken, and examined it. Kim Jong Il was right.
Even the breeders, who observed and examined the chickens every day to prevent ones with different characters mixing, had failed to notice the chicken. However, Kim Jong Il had noticed the laying chicken among the thousands of similar-looking fatteners at first glance.
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