If this is a viable reading, then “On Bringing Back Chickens…” becomes a “slippery slope” argument about chickens in Salem: if we allow only hens into Salem now, how long will it be before we start legislating who and what else can legally enter the city limits, and who can’t? And the pun on “cock” — a word which ties the chicken world to the human world — is thus appropriate, not gratuitous, in so far as it asks us to consider how much our treatment of chickens has in common with our treatment of humans (i.e., why the same rules don’t apply to the treatment of chickens as humans). Is this therefore a piece of animal rights verse? A P.E.T.A. poem? A metaphor, a la Orwell’s Animal Farm, for human rights? Perhaps it’s all of the above!