Parable

I found this story in the Readers Digest many years ago and lost track of it. I finally found again with a search program called “Duck Duck Go” .

The ‘parable of Henry the pheasant’. A pheasant is a bird, in case you were wondering. The location is England in Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home. The season is just after a harsh winter that took toll of the pheasant population, and hunters had been busy, clearing the remaining ones. Only one pheasant remained, and the locals gave him a name- Henry. One pheasant in control of the palace gardens means one thing, abundance. There was food in the freshly seeded field. Henry had no competition and his intake was largely unregulated by the environment. He ate constantly, and eat he did so much that before long, he was enormous! He used his enormous stature to scare other birds away, consuming even more food. He became so fat that they made him a tourist attraction: the fat pheasant Henry. An obese pheasant meant only one thing- he could no longer fly. He lived the high life, but not on the sky. What is a bird that cannot fly? Soon, Henry disappeared. A fox ate him. May he rest in peace.

The parable of Henry teaches us many lessons, the most outstanding being how much we sacrifice our long-term interests for short-term rewards. It teaches us how ill-equipped we are to handle abundance sometimes, and what becomes of us in these times. We get so blinded that we can only see two steps ahead, not further. When food and money are in rapidly growing supply, Dr. Peter Whybrow, who told this parable, says that we lose the ability to self regulate.

Sometimes when things seem to good to be true, think of Henry.