So, Just Why DID the Chicken Cross the Road?

Because of the planetary popularity of poultry, their peculiarities proceed with a pretty prestigious pecking position in this presentation. My point? Prepare to ponder! Pok, pok, pok, pok, pok!

Have you ever encountered a live chicken or heard one ‘cluck’, in person? Even if you haven’t, you could still likely identify a hen or a rooster in a police line-up of farm animals. Almost all of us have held or handled a chicken egg. We not only know what one looks like, and its fragility, but how it tastes in a scrambled, boiled or fried state. The majority of humans on the planet, have likewise eaten chicken-meat at some point. Chickens may just well be the most familiar animal to the greatest number of people in the world. Even in a country, like The Maldives, where, by law there are no dogs – there are chickens! In Afghanistan, there is apparently only one pig in all the land, but there are still plenty of chickens. The question remains however - even though we can recognize an egg and the chicken from whence it came and the 'bucket in the sky' at KFC, special knowledge surrounding chickens is sorely lacking in most people's repertoires.

Growing up on a farm wasn’t all just work – it had some advantages. Between the ages of four and twelve, I was never at a loss for adventures to keep me occupied. My siblings and I had a variety of animals to chase around or that could and would chase us. Raising hogs for market was the main focus of our family-farm life, so we always had plenty of them around – plenty in all shapes, sizes and ages. We looked after two milk cows which eventually faded somewhere into my childhood memories. Later, my brother wanted a horse so, when he became a farmer himself, and had his own money, he bought one and named it Spirit. There were dogs and cats around – sometimes more cats than dogs and at other times more dogs than cats, but there seemed to be plenty of both. The cats were relentless hunters. Occasionally a ‘mama kitty’ would instinctively steal her way into the chicken house for a quick and convenient meal from ‘Skip the Hunting’. As harmless as losing one chicken now and then may seem, we had to discourage that sort of behavior, mostly out of respect for Grandpa and his flock of hens and roosters.

Chickens were the only farm animals we had that rivaled the pigs in number or in amount of care required from our family. Even though everyone took turns looking after the older chickens, it was my grandpa who first initiated the young chicks into the culture of the farm. One day every May, my grandfather would come home from the city with one hundred baby chickens. One hundred times he would dip his weathered hand into the big flat cardboard delivery box and nimbly pluck one of them out. During close inspection for identification purposes, he would softly cradle each chick in his hands before releasing it. It would then scurry like a fuzzy peeping bubble, into the arena of life - a heated circular enclosure which would serve as home for the next two weeks. It was important that the baby chicks lived within this circular enclosure for the first ten days so that they wouldn’t crowd in panic or in search for extra warmth into some corner of the rectangular interior. If they did that, some could easily suffocate in the mob and die.

1. Suffocation is one of the top five causes of chick death and can be easily prevented using housing designs with circular enclosures to augment proper heating. Interestingly, one of the leading causes of death in adult chickens, is Sunday dinner!

As winter slipped away into April, Grandpa would anxiously commence repairing holes and windows in the little shed. In preparation for the new batch of chickens he would hunt for compromised sections of the fence around the shed and patch them flawlessly. There was an elm tree in one corner of the fenced-in area that he would prune to (his) rigid specifications in order to provide the chickens with exactly the right amount of shade come summer. There was a wooden-plank sloping gradually from the ground to the first main limb of the tree, giving the chickens an easy climb to the various branches for roosting amongst the leaves. Everything was perfect. I remember thinking that if I were a chicken, this is where I would want to live. One half of the original occupants of the delivery box were supposedly roosters and the other half, hens. It was really hard to tell one chick from another though. So we never knew for sure until they grew older, losing their baby fluff to patches of real feathers. By the time autumn rolled around they were fully feathered and nearly adults. The roosters developed floppy red combs on the tops of their heads and wobbly red jowls from the under-sides. These features along with their burgeoning tail feathers allowed for quick identification of the males of the species. The females (hens), on the other hand, were smaller with almost non-existent combs and less-pronounced jowls and, shorter tail feathers. Unbeknownst to most, was another familiar gender-reveal trick we used – hens would either run away or simply ‘squat’ in resignation, if we chased or cornered them, while the roosters would turn and avenge the stress of being chased. They indeed would launch an assault of their own. As they closed in on the target of their pursuit, they would elevate their wings in preparation for a swoop attack, as maybe their flying ancestors had done millions of years earlier.

2. Malay roosters can grow to a height of nearly one meter and may appear somewhat imposing should they ever be inclined to chase an unsuspecting farm kid through the yard.

3. It is reported that chickens actually like to play – mostly with each other but, sometimes with their humans by chasing them or by coaxing the caregivers to give chase. My sister suffered from severe ‘alektorophobia’ or fear of (being chased by) chickens.

Sometimes, I felt sorry for our chickens. We all wanted to be around them when they were little balls of cuteness, but once they were older, we looked at them only as extra work. If they had feelings, they must truly have been hurt by that lack of affection toward them as they grew. But alas, they continued their seemingly happy and mundane lives scratching dirt, following the same daily routines and, droning on with their same crazy chicken language . . .

4. A language, which according to some experts, carries meaning with every little peep and squawk – each cluck being the equivalent of a complete human sentence. The average English sentence contains nearly 15 words. The average chicken is capable of making 120 separate sounds in a minute. That equates to 1800 words per minute. Compare that to an average human being able to articulate an anemic 150 spoken words per minute, or even a mediocre 630 words per minute spoken by the world record holder. “The Invaders Plan”, a novel by L.R. Hubbard is the longest English novel on record with 1.2 million words. If a chicken were to read this book aloud, and without stopping to lay eggs or other chicken stuff, it could finish in 667 minutes or just over 11 hours. In comparison, a China Southern flight from Vancouver, Canada to Guangzhou, China takes 12 hours.

Often, I would attempt to speak that language when I opened the cover of the egg-laying hutch. I imagined that if I imitated their ‘chicken-speak’, they would not consider me a thief after their eggs, and spare me from pecks on the hands as I searched for treasure in the nest-straw. Because the hens were separated from the roosters before they reached the age of sexual maturity, no fertilization of eggs ever occurred and, as a result, all we gathered were chickless. This did not stop the hens, however, from turning the eggs after laying them.

5. Chickens will turn their eggs in their nest (using their beaks but occasionally wings or feet) up to 50 times a day for the 21 days of normal incubation. They do so to ensure even warming of the egg and, to stimulate the developing embryo inside. In perspective, that is the same as you flipping the pillow on your bed 1000 times in a three-week period, but using just your nose.

If the eggs were not gathered in a timely fashion twice a day, they were sometimes inadvertently turned right out of the nest and onto the floor, or into another nest of eggs. In either case, the shells would crack and their contents would be lost.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of these birds is that they are flightless. Evidently, somewhere along the long and winding road of evolution, chickens found it more advantageous to remain on the ground than to risk injury while air-borne or while attempting the transition. Whatever nature's plan, it appears to have paid some dividends.

6. Chickens have since become the most successful bird on earth – ever, with an estimated 25 billion of them on the planet presently (which is enough chickens standing wing-to-wing and beak-to-tail, to completely cover the Caribbean Island of Bermuda - 45 times over).

7. Chicken-meat is one of the most consumed around the world, ranking third behind pork and fish. The average North American consumes about 43 kilograms of chicken-meat per year.

8. The mean annual planetary egg consumption per capita is 180. 'Cool Hand Luke' played by Paul Newman in the 1960s movie of the same name, ate 50 in one sitting. World-wide, this per capita amount equates to a total of over 1.3 trillion eggs annually, produced by a mere 7 billion chickens. If the same chickens laid eggs at that rate starting in the year 1670 (which is the year the Hudson’s Bay Company was chartered), and if none were broken in the interim, every square centimeter of the earth’s surface (510.1 million km²) would now be completely covered by chicken eggs – talk about walking on eggshells!

By the way, the heaviest chicken egg ever laid, weighed in at just a smidgeon over one pound and was the proud achievement of a 6-pound white leghorn hen. That is equivalent to a 140-pound woman giving birth to a 23-pound bouncing bundle of joy – OUCH!!!

Chickens eventually coaxed, trained and persuaded their domesticators to raise them, care for them, feed them and house them, all in exchange for an average daily output of one egg and / or a drumstick or two at the end of their lives.

9. It is estimated that chickens were first domesticated about 8000 years ago, in 6000 B.C. This, oddly enough, is also the year that beer was invented in the Near East. There is some speculation that, because of the temporal and regional proximity of these two events, the first ‘Hot Wings Wednesday’ was also celebrated later that same year.

Although chickens are not able to remain airborne for more than just a few seconds – probably due to adaptive weight-gain strategies built into their physiology after many years of domestication – they have not given up their constant attempts to regain their flight status.

10. One source reported the record flight time for a chicken, to be 13 seconds. To add perspective, Usain Bolt, in 2009 was victorious in the fastest sprint competition in history – a 150-meter street race in Manchester England – it lasted 14.35 seconds.

From what I know of chickens, 13 seconds of air time is truly an amazing record. What I could not find out though, was whether the chicken left the ground of its own accord or whether it was pushed off some sort of platform and then timed while it withstood the effects of gravity for the next few seconds. The higher the platform of course, the longer it would stay in the air. In an episode of “WKRP In Cincinnati”, Les Nessman reported on the attempts made by turkeys (also flightless birds) to fly, when pushed out of a helicopter for a Thanksgiving-Day promotion. Things did not fare well for the turkeys however, even though they were in the air for nearly a minute.

One summer, a tornado touched down on our farm. It destroyed two barns and some other out-buildings, including grandpa’s chicken house. The next morning, a few of the chickens lay dead in white tombstone-like mounds around the yard. There were some survivors in a second group which ambled unscathed, aimlessly scratching at grain leaked from damaged bins. This group clucked and squawked as usual, totally oblivious to the fact that they were no longer in a chicken house or bound by a fence. For all they appeared to know, they had simply been killed in the storm and were now in free-range chicken heaven. And finally, there were a few that somehow made their way to totally uncharted farmyard domains – uncharted for chickens anyway. If you have ever been privy to the wrath of a tornado, you will understand my take on the surreal sights of that morning after. Splintered wooden planks driven into the ground so deeply that tractors were needed to pull them out. Yard-light bulbs actually unscrewed and dropped unbroken to the ground, directly below their now-empty sockets. Entire barns lifted up and moved to knew locations without any other apparent damage. A farmyard scene which had been my most familiar backdrop for the only 24 years of my life was now drastically altered for the worse. As much as this graveyard of wood and steel and glass was confusing to look at, perhaps the most incoherent sight that morning was to see a group of four chickens walking along the ridge-cap of shingles on top of the only remaining barn roof. I don’t know for sure if this third assemblage of chickens got to their new location by personal means or if there were higher-powers involved. But, since the longest recorded flight time, as mentioned, for any chicken is only a modest few seconds and, their new location was a minimum of 30 feet off the ground and, there had been a recent tornado, I was willing to bet in favor of the outside forces.

11. Chickens are touted as being very intelligent animals, with outstanding memories. Apparently, they can distinguish between 100 different faces of people and other animals. They have full-color vision and they are capable of dreaming and communication with their unhatched young or other members of their flock. Because they are vertebrates, they have a central nervous system, capable of feeling pain and responding to stress. A few of the sources I surveyed, even claimed chickens to be as intelligent as young children. From my observations as a parent and a former teacher, I believe that claim to have some validity.

With chickens possessing such mental prowess, one can't help but wonder what the conversation amongst these birds must have sounded like as they were whisked abruptly into the night. One or two clucks perhaps as the wind picked up and removed the shed from above their heads. Another prolonged chicken shriek as they gained altitude. And maybe one final sharp squawk of “WTF” as they were subsequently deposited on the barn roof. As the morning-after wore on, the terrestrial survivors in Sub-flock-two successfully navigated the maze of debris and broken boards to a point in the yard where they could fully vantage their brethren on the crest of the barn roof. Now, I am not totally fluent in 'the native tongue of chickens', but I’m pretty sure at that moment of first visual contact, there burst forth a truly great abundance of brilliant avian pride and boastfulness from up there on that roof, the likes of which has not been seen in the world of barnyard fowl in hundreds, maybe thousands of years. This may have been surpassed only by the billowing grey shroud of avian envy emanating from those down there on the ground. As Group Three beat their wings to their chests and clucked down to Group Two, “Hey, you guys!! Guess what we did? Yeh, look up here. We flew last night. We did it! We flew!”, I actually questioned the need for bringing them back to earth at all – at least not right then anyway. So, I waited and let them have their glory, their moment in the sun, their time on the barn roof and eventually, I gave in and rescued them. As they reunited with their fold, I overheard them elaborate to their adoring fans, the details of their most recent and excellent adventure!

12. A chicken, as is the case with any bird, does not urinate and consequently, possesses no bladder for urine storage. As an adaptive evolutionary strategy, its kidneys remove and recycle water from metabolic waste leaving uric acid to be mixed with digestive waste. The resulting paste mixture is then excreted from the cloaca, an organ specific to birds and reptiles. The cloaca functions in both the reproductive and the excretory systems. Studies done at the University of Missouri, found that one commercial laying hen will generate approximately 1.8 pounds of waste per week . Over the course of one year a typical chicken will eliminate 93 pounds of waste. World-wide, the amount of chicken manure produced annually would be around 2.3 trillion pounds (1.2 billion tons / over one trillion kilograms). To put it another way, chickens on earth annually excrete a volume of waste comparable to the contents of 420 thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools. This quantity would blanket a land area larger than the entire city of Chicago and, at a depth of nearly 2 meters - but hopefully not on a windy day!

I once had a job working on an egg farm. There were four barns, each housing about 10 thousand laying hens. My responsibility was to transfer manure out of the barns into a mobile storage unit called a ‘honey-wagon’. Once the wagon was filled, I would pull it away from the barn with a tractor and spread the waste, as fertilizer, on neighboring farmland. Forty thousand hens were capable of producing ten thousand pounds (five tons) of manure per day. Disposing of that volume of chicken waste may have been achievable if indeed, all of the machines required, ever collectively decided to function properly. However, because of the thick pasty consistency of chicken manure, the aging equipment used to auger the waste out of the barn and into the waiting ‘honey wagon’ was not able to withstand any substantial volume at any one time. If the volume of manure exceeded the torque strength of the metal parts, safety bolts would snap and pop like so much breakfast cereal and, the auger would cease to turn. It is important for the reader to realize that this problem never occurred when the auger pit was void of manure. Consequently, if the shear bolt broke, it had to be repaired somewhere beneath the surface level of the chicken manure filling the pit. Did I mention that I was the farmhand responsible for the barn-cleaning process? Anyway, I estimate that the system usually ground to a halt once per hour. The first time this happened, the repair situation lasted the rest of the day as I spent considerable time deliberating on how to bypass the steaming poop in the pit in order to access the damaged machine parts. From the second episode and beyond however, I ultimately became suitably proficient at stripping from the waist up, laying on my side on the frigid damp barn floor, and enthusiastically submerging my hand and arm, up to my ear-lobe, into the chicken manure in an effort to ‘feel the force’ of the hole into which to insert the replacement shear bolt through the shaft. Once the opening was found, I would remove my arm and select a new bolt. I would always keep one hand and arm clean in case I needed to scratch my nose or wipe my eye. Then I would plunge again, with the bolt this time, insert the bolt in the hole, remove my arm, grab a nut to put onto the bolt, re-dip, thread the nut onto the bolt, remove my arm, find an open-end wrench of the appropriate size, go for one last dive and finally tighten the nut on the bolt, remove my arm, wipe off as much organic waste as I could, put my clothes back on and continue with the larger task-at-hand.

13. When an egg leaves a chicken’s body, it is approximately 41 degrees Celsius. If our bodies produced the heat needed to give us an equal reading, we would certainly require hospitalization and administration of fever reduction procedures and medication. The reason for this high temperature is that the chicken’s metabolism is naturally elevated, indicated by a normal heart rate of around 300 beats per minute (four to five times that of a human).

Ultimately, when chicken manure leaves a chicken’s body it is the same temperature as a freshly laid egg, so really, I was lucky in a weird ‘Pollyanna’ sort of way because when the time came for me to submerge my entire ungarbed right side into the chicken manure, it was usually sort of warm! Anyway, it was literally the crappiest job I ever had.

I had a friend from Venezuela who attended our university on a contract from his government – a contract to research the artificial insemination of chickens. He hired me as an editor for the written segment of his study, as well as to photograph the various steps in the procedure of artificially inseminating a chicken. One day he requested to tour me through the chicken barns in which he worked. He demanded, of course, that I bring my camera. I took photos of the roosters while he collected semen and of the hens when he introduced the semen artificially, as well as several that illustrated the general kooky nature of chickens. The whole process seemed to involve a lot of non-consenting violation - a shutter-click away from chicken porn or something. I truly wondered if what he was doing was legal and if my part in it would be construed as a felony. However, my friend was very professional about it all, and carried out all the steps in a truly scientific and very matter-of-fact manner. Therefore, I soon got over the feeling we needed to paste black-out bars over any of the chicken's eyes to obscure accurate identification of the individuals involved. Eventually we made our way into a separate barn, which he described as being home to some very special chickens used for important research for the hospital on campus. I would estimate 500 chickens were housed in that barn. He asked me to stand near the centre of the barn, which was poorly lit, in order to take a photo of the animals in one particular cage. I had to use a flash because of the dark surroundings. It was almost impossible to focus on the particular cage. I squinted as best I could, adjusted apertures and f-stops and finally took the picture, not knowing how it would turn out. As the crackle of white electric light burst from the little black box mounted on my camera and shot outward into the darkest reaches of the barn, perhaps 400 of the chickens therein, went into some sort of violent seizure. The remaining 100 cheered loudly in support. Four hundred would-be muggers jumping out of waste bins and doorways in some secluded back alley would not have shocked my senses any more than those 400 chickens did. Of course, I had no idea what was going on, but my little Venezuelan amigo was on the floor, rolling around in uncontrollable laughter, and of course, chicken manure.

14. Apparently, these particular chickens carried a gene for photosensitive epilepsy, a form triggered by a flash of light causing violent seizures. Since the behaviors associated with epilepsy are comparable in chickens and humans, the chickens were part of the experimentation going on at the university, allowing the researchers on campus to link their findings using chickens with what they knew about epilepsy in humans.

I didn’t see the humor in all of it at the time but the situation gradually calmed. I lost the immediate desire to flee in fear of being held responsible for messing up some good scientific research. On ascertaining that my friend was not in seizure himself, I laughed a little about what had just occurred. Since that time, I have fortunately had the opportunity to discuss, with various and diverse groups of people, what I know about chickens and epilepsy – a subject I would not have normally had the good luck nor the inclination to ever engage in.

Other than navigating through small clusters of chickens while walking or driving in China and parts of South East Asia, the epileptic birds were my last encounter with live chickens. Because of my many experiences with chickens throughout my life, I now migrate, at parties and family gatherings, toward parts of the room where conversations about chickens are taking place. I don’t consider myself an expert on chickens by any means, but I do take pride in the fact that I have walked this path from my early days of watching my grandfather dote on his cute, downy little bundles, and the feelings of joy and excitement I got when I helped him – to the days when chickens were nothing more than extra work, piled onto an already-full plate of farm chores - to feeling disgust for the manner in which some farm animals are treated in order to satisfy the greedy and convenient needs of man. For that reason I still prefer my chicken-meat and eggs to come from farms that choose to raise their animals more humanely. I think that my interest in chickens was also rejuvenated for the better when I realized that they were doing their part, assisting in the research of epilepsy. I once again looked at them as having a role in the whole scheme of things – not just as a source of food or as a subject in an experiment but as true characters in the history of the planet we all share, giving me cause to realize just how special they are.

Sources: The calculations I use throughout this account of ‘chicken knowledge’ are my own manipulations of raw data encountered here and there in my life. My knowledge of chickens has been greatly improved by studying General Biology, Genetics and Zoology at the university level and from teaching Biology at the high-school level for over 30 years. I also picked up a lot of information from personal / first-hand experience and from my grandfather’s wisdom and guidance. There were, of course, other chicken farmers and egg producers and Venezuelan acquaintances that have naturally enhanced my common (and uncommon) knowledge about chickens along the way.