chicken -- 5/28/25

27 May 2025

chicken -- 5/28/25

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Today's selection-- from What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery. Sy Montgomery shares how chickens are among the most common animals on Earth, yet they're deeply misunderstood and often dismissed.

“People think they know lots about chickens, and you'd think they would: there are four living chickens for every living person in the world—and since by definition they are domestic fowl (they are a separate subspecies from their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia), all of them live among humans. There are at least four places in the United States named after chickens, including the towns of Chicken, Alaska (which was supposed to be named after a local grouse, the ptarmigan, but nobody could spell it), and Chickentown, Pennsylvania (named after its many poultry farms); in 1939, the Delaware state legislature, braving the opposition of the State Federation of Women's Clubs of Delaware (which wanted the cardinal instead), selected the Blue Hen chicken, a local variety but not a true breed, as its state bird.

“Still, chickens are rarely celebrated in our culture and rarely given the respect they deserve. I once sat next to a man on an airplane who detailed for me at length the attributes of the species: they are stupid, disgusting, filthy, cowardly, occasionally cannibalistic automatons, he said. How had he acquired this opinion? It turned out he had worked at a factory farm—the sort of place where most chickens are raised for food in the United States—in a dirty, overcrowded warehouse that resembled a prison camp.

“This is not the best place to get to know someone. Nor is a dinner plate. Yet for most of us, our relationship with chickens is generally of a culinary nature. In fact, the first definition for the word ‘chicken’ I encountered on the internet doesn't even mention that it's a bird. It's ‘the flesh of a chicken used for food.’ The average American eats more than one hundred pounds of chicken per year, according to the National Chicken Council, making it the most popular meat consumed in the United States. Worldwide, some seventy billion birds yearly are roasted, boiled, Kentucky Fried, and turned into everything from McNuggets to the famous ‘Jewish penicillin,’ chicken soup. (One of my friends, an award-winning journalist and talented cook, was shocked to learn, when she was nearly forty, that it is physically possible to make soup without chicken stock.)

Male (left) and female (right)

“The disturbing fact that, on the way to the soup pot, a chicken can continue to run around after decapitation does little to bolster appreciation for the species' more refined traits. One rooster was able to live for eighteen months after his head was cut off. Farmer Lloyd Olsen, hoping to please his visiting mother-in-law, who particularly savored boiled chicken neck, failed to kill the rooster when his ax missed the bird's carotid artery and left one ear and most of the brain stem intact. Not only did the victim survive, but he grew from two and a half pounds to eight, and attained national fame as Mike the Headless Chicken on the sideshow circuit from 1945 to 1947. Even now, the rooster's hometown of Fruita, Colorado, holds the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival the third weekend in May each year—a day of races, games, and food intended, as its organizers say, to celebrate the bird's ‘admirable will to live.’ But alas, Mike's story also perpetuates the one ‘fact’ most people claim to know about chickens: that they are automatons too stupid to know if they're dead or alive.

“But, as I've come to learn over the decades of sharing my life with successive flocks of these affectionate, industrious, and resourceful birds, almost everything people ‘know’ about chickens is wrong.”