Hamilton Gardens and the one-legged duck

Around 2 hours drive from Auckland going down to the South is the city of Hamilton where they have the Hamilton Gardens, a 58 hectare area of a variety of different gardens. The gardens are grouped into 4 garden collections. It is owned and is well-maintained by the Hamilton City Council and admission is free (kudos to the Hamilton City Council! ;)

Missy's sisters, Ate Jojo and Ate Joan, left us there to explore the whole afternoon and would come back for us by late afternoon. So Missy, Beth and I toured the first two garden collections and on the way to the 3rd collection where there was a Rose garden, we decided to get some coffee and then rest on an open field and as the grass was too inviting, we took a nap and by the time we were woken up by the rehearsing country band for a concert that night, Ate Jojo, Ate Joan and John (Ate Jojo's bf who resides in Hamilton) still found us on the grass slouching and we could only grin when Ate Jojo asked how was the Rose garden.

We had a picnic of a bucket of KFC chicken (by the way, there's also no gravy sauce in KFCs in NZ like in Singapore where there is no gravy but chili sauce...I wonder now if is it only in the Philippines that there is an overflowing supply of gravy in KFCs?) with a number of ducks that seemed to want to join us and the other picnickers. This is how we discovered the one-legged duck. We thought the duck was just hiding his other foot under its feathers (to amuse us and get the food? hehe) but after more observation, we saw that it just really had one leg. But the amazing thing is the one-legged duck looked healthy and seemed like it doesn't have difficulty with having one leg as it just did a little duck hop instead of duck walk. It looked cute but at the same time it made you feel pityful, as obviously this one-legged duck was singled out by the other normal ducks. So we gave the special treatment to the one-legged duck, it was only to it that we shared our food (the bread we had and not the chicken, ok? :-P we didn't think a duck would like to eat its relative, chicken). Funny how even animals behave like human beings on singling somebody out because of its being different from the usual. I admire this one-legged duck for despite its abnormality, it has managed to survive healthyly and was moving with the other normal ducks. This makes me wonder, how people who are called "abnormal" could actually live normally and are happy while some people who are born "normal" feel incomplete. But the again, is the one-legged duck really happy?