Well, true! And Mouse does know that - they’ve grown up with pet chickens, and eat quite a lot of chicken meat. Their other favourite toilet book, the New Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency, contains fascinating diagrams for killing and dismembering a chicken (bird) to make chicken (meat).
But what I’m getting at here is the Mouse-ear soundscape of the world. When grownups are blathering on and the word “chicken” floats past, you have to scramble to work out if they mean your pet or the food.
It’s okay to attack your meat with a knife and fork, but not okay to attack your pet, even if they are the same word. You are not allowed to put ketchup on the “pet” category of chicken, even though it is THE SAME. You can put both things in the compost when finished, but only one event is Death and therefore Sad, and the other is Mouse Why Did You Do That To Your Dinner; Now We Can Only Feed It To the Earthworms. When your chickens die, they don’t come back, but the chicken you didn’t eat at dinner mysteriously presents itself again as lunch. Chicken is food, but not “chicken food”, which is apparently the pellets you feed to chickens. (Despite sounding very similar, chicken pellets and chicken nuggets are not the same thing at all.) Chickens quite like eating chicken meat; it’s impolite for humans to bite pets. Eat your chicken / be gentle with your chicken. Okay, you can play with your chickens / Don’t play with your food. Sometimes chicken is a pet, sometimes food, sometimes cowardice, sometimes an abstracted flavour of instant noodle. Yes, they’re the same thing, but they’re not the same THING - Mouse is three and sees right through that argument.
The world is terribly complex, and often seemingly hypocritical; and learning other complex things at the same time - English; decorum - is a bewildering task.
what’s cute to me is that Mouse recognises the same spoken word can have different contexts and meanings. mouse was checking a few things at once; testing if they’d misheard; testing if “salami” has multiple meanings and nuances that they don’t understand yet; testing if earthworms are connected to salami (and by what process does this alchemy occur? The mental picture is immediate and worrisome.) I loved their method of politely checking out the possibilities!