[neilep (OP)]

Hadrian....are you sure it's from Hawaii ?..it's not wearing one of those flowery necklaces things !![] (what are they called again ?)...... one minute later.........ahh !! it's a lei..(thanks google)

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[Hadrian]

It was definitely surfing the net when I found it.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[gary_lankford]

quote: I wonder how the chicken became the staple fowl of choice.

I suspect that the proto-chicken took to hanging around humans because of food, much like dogs.  The growing and threshing of grain provided a ready source of feed (localized to humans) to the birds.  Naturally, men took advantage of the resulting taming (domestication) to take eggs and fowl for food. The birds made the first move toward domestication.

Gary Lankford

[Karen W.]

Hey Neil, as a child my family raised 300 chickens a year give or take a few who would take flight before we got their wings clipped, as it was a large job to do. As children it was our job to chase them down and deliver them to my mother and step dad so they could clip their wings.

 Clipping had one primary function to keep the flights low to the ground so our 15 ft pen would keep them in then we could control their movement somewhat. Then we had to keep that pen covered with chicken wire, because clipping was akin to hobbling, left the chiken pretty defenceless when it come to becoming prey for the hawks. Not to say they could not put up a pretty good defece, especially the roosters they were pretty mean sometimes. I remember one in particular who hadn't had his wings clipped, because he was so mean. you could not catch him and when you did he would tear the ***** right out of you, so we kept our distaance. My mother went in to collect eggs one afternoon and he flew up and landed on her back, hooking his dew claw, (talon) into the back of her neck just at the spine. he dugit in so deep she couldn't move. My step father began slapping at him to get him off but he was stuck and causing alot of pain and damage to my mother.my dad picked up the garden shovel and ran back in and began hitting the chicken with the shovel because he couln't pull him loose. Once he killed the chicken he took my mother to the hospital, (Chicken attached to her at the back of her neck), where a surgeon removed the talon which was wedged in and wrapped around the spinal cord area below her neck. The Doc said she was lucky he hadn't severed the thing trying to kill the Rooster. How the heck is that for a frightening Rooster story! I am still scared to death of the little beggars, but I have statue ones all over my house. They can be very pretty, but not much for brains. I won't be around any that are not clipped, but just the roosters. Hens are pretty docile for the most part, You think it might be all that Testosterom, or do Roosters even have testosterom? (sorry spelling) Anyway, they fly well unless you impede that flight by clipping. Just as someone mentioned above.

[neilep (OP)]

Karen,

I'm just glad your mother survived her close encounter with the rooster. Did you eat it afterwards ?...after all, it must have been well tenderised after being repeatedly clouted with a shovel !!...it's a good job your dad had a good aim.

Hang on karen...I reckon you've got a good story for the making of a horror flick.... "Attack of The killer Chickens ".....I see it in the same style and budget as the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy!!..Yayyyyy !!

THANK YOU for your chicken orientated insight karen.....amazing !!

[Karen W.]

No problem..... I had no trouble eating the little stinkers after that. It was back as a wee one of about 5 that I stopped eating them. As a child having to catch them to butcher them that I did not eat them for awhile. But thats a tale for another time, but if you insist I will tell......

[Hadrian]

Who pluck up the courage to start this up again?   []

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[neilep (OP)]

quote:Originally posted by Hadrian

Who pluck up the courage to start this up again?   []

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Well it wasn't me Guv !!..Honest !!..It was HER *points finger at Karens post*... the girly !...she has a Talont for chicken Tails !!

Karen, I think I can understand why for a while you stopped eating chicken...I can imagine the chaos at butchering them !!..I don't suppose they were lulled into a calm state by you singing a lullaby !!.....If you wish to elaborate further then please do tell.....This is the ' chicken ' part of the site after all..
[]

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[JimBob]

You know, the remark about butchering chickes takes me back to my early childhood.

**IMAGINE** A five year old, a hand ax, a tree stump, a chicken and Sunday morning at grandma's. Chicken dinner is 5 hours a way......

Chickens really do run around with their heads cut off - spurting blood.

It is enough to warp any child into a writer, especially if they must pluck the pen feathers.


The mind is like a parachute. It works best when open.  -- A. Einstein

[Hadrian]

Here a story I came across

He really was a chicken running around with his head cut off.
The e-mail message seemed innocent enough.  A reader simply asked "Ever heard of the story posted here at this link?" and offered a hyperlink to another web page.  I clicked and came across a story that I was sure had to be pure fiction. The only problem is that the story appears to be totally true.  
This is the story about Mike the chicken. Mike, of course, was not your ordinary chicken. No, not ordinary at all. You see, Mike was a headless chicken. If you want to be really specific, Mike was actually a headless Wyandotte rooster.  
I should point out that Mike wasn't always a headless bird. In fact, he was born 100% normal, complete with a head (most normal chickens have one of these) in Fruita, Colorado.  
On September 10, 1945, Mike's short five-and-a-half month life was about to take a turn for the worse. On this day, Mike received a death sentence. His owners, Lloyd and Clara Olsen, decided that it was time to slaughter a group of birds, some to sell and to prepare others for themselves.  Out to the hen house they went…
Watch out Mike!  
As you can probably imagine, Mr. Olsen was the one whacking the heads off while Clara plucked and cleaned the birds.  
Bash! Down came the ax and off went Mike's head.  
Mike's head was surely dead. Mike's body was not.  
Now I know what you are thinking - it is well known that chickens will run around frantically when their heads are chopped off.  That's probably where that old expression comes from. And, everyone knows that a headless chicken just can't survive more than a few moments.  
 
Apparently, Mike forgot to read the rulebook for playing the game of Life. His head may have been lying on the floor, but he had no problem standing up and strutting around as if nothing had actually happened.   The next day, Mike was still flopping around, so Lloyd decided to feed him to see how long he could keep the bird alive.  Day after day he continued to gain weight.  
Mike could easily balance himself on the highest perches without falling. His crowing consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat. Mike even attempted to preen his feathers with his nonexistent head (apparently he never noticed). It seems that Mike could do just about anything that any other chicken could do, if you exclude all of the functions of his head.  
As I'm sure you can imagine, headless chickens are not an everyday event. In the tradition of that famous huckster Barnum, there was money to be made in this oddity.   A promoter by the name of Hope Wade came along and convinced Lloyd that Mike would be a big draw in the sideshow circuit.  Miracle Mike, as he soon came to be known, toured up and down the West Coast of the United States.  Just six weeks after his beheading, Mike was featured in a Life magazine article and his fame grew.  For just 25 cents, anyone could pay to get a look at Mike. At the height of his popularity, Mike was raking in a cool $4,500 per month, which was no small potatoes in those days.  They probably would have thrown in his head as a bonus - it was stored in a canning jar and toured along with Mike.  (Actually, a cat ate Mike’s head.  Some other poor chicken’s head was pickled in the jar.)
And, if there was money to be made, there were also copycats. Other people in Mike's hometown began to chop the heads off of their own chickens in an attempt to get in on the scheme. One copycat headless rooster was named Lucky and he managed to live for eleven days before bashing himself into a stovepipe and dying (Lucky wasn't that lucky after all). Several other headless chickens lived for a couple of days.  


So how was Mike able to survive? Scientists examined him and determined that Mr. Olsen had not done a very good job at chopping Mike's head off.  Most of the head was actually removed, but one ear remained intact. The slice actually missed the jugular vein and a clot prevented him from bleeding to death. Apparently, most of a chicken's reflex actions are located in the brain stem, which was also largely untouched.  Mike was also examined by the officers of several humane societies and was declared to have been free from suffering.  
Through his open esophagus, Mike was fed a mixture of ground up grain and water with your typical eyedropper. Little bits of gravel were dropped down his throat to help his gizzard grind up the food.
 
One serious problem that Mike commonly experienced was that he would start to choke on his own mucus.  The Olsens came up with the simple solution of using a syringe to suck the mucus out.  But, one day tragedy struck.  Mike was traveling back home to Fruita and was roosting with the Olsens in their Phoenix motel room.  They heard Mike choking in the middle of the night and quickly realized that they had left the syringe at the sideshow the day before.  Miracle Mike was no more.  
The exact date of Mike’s belated departure from this world was never recorded.  Years later, it was estimated, based on Lloyd’s information, that Miracle Mike died in March of 1947.  Eighteen months living without a head could be considered a world’s record.  Yet, Lloyd didn’t want to admit that he had accidentally killed the bird, so he claimed that he had sold the bird off.  This little white lie is the reason that many of the stories printed about Mike claimed that he was still touring the country as late as 1949.  
But wait, the story is not over! Mike actually has his own holiday! On May 17, 1999, Mike's hometown of Fruita held the first "Mike the Headless Chicken Day" in honor of one of its most famous citizens.  Some of the events included the 5K Run Like a Headless Chicken Race, egg tosses, Pin the Head on the Chicken, the Chicken Cluck-Off, and the classic Chicken Dance. The food offerings included - you guessed it - chicken, chicken salad, and the like. Let's not forget the great game of Chicken Bingo in which the numbers were chosen by where chicken droppings fell on a numbered grid.  
If you are interested, Mike the Headless Chicken Day is an annual event. As peculiar as it is to describe, it actually sounds like a great time.  And it’s all done in celebration of the life of one lucky bird named Miracle Mike.  
Useless? Useful? I'll leave that for you to decide.  
 


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[Karen W.]

Yes indeed, I know the story well and know it to be true. Quite amazing.
 Well, I was small around 5 or 6 years old when the butchering was taking place. Every year we raised oh around 300 to 500 chickens a year.
  All the cousins , Aunts Uncles would come, grandparents and some neighbors. My parents would set up huge long tables down through our back yard where it was a full assembly line.Boiling water in Large aluminum and tin tubs, tubs for plukin and then tubs for trimming, and tubs for cleaning,ect. we also had lines for hangin. They would send us children out into the yard to catch the first group , deliver them to my father and the men folk over the back fence where they were decapitated and thrown back over the fence to run the gambit around the yard in search of their head, (as kids thats what we were told), untill they just flopped over and stopped running. It was a bloody mess! I never thought anything of it till this one year they butchered a couple days after my birthday and this headless chicken come flying back over the fence and ran all over the yard. Finally it jumped up in my brand new Rado Flyer wagon I got for my birthday and flopped around in there for quite awhile. I was so horrified that I ran down to tell the darn chicken to shoo out of my wagon. I must have realized that the chicken had blood and was dead, I don't know, but I was so horrified it took years before I would eat chicken again. I could not go near the chickens forever after that. Today I am still quite frightened by them if I am near them. Not so much the hens but the roosters. I could not even feed them. I guess I felt like Karma or something was going to get me. Maybe  a reincarnated chicken or something! Who knows what a kid thinks, but it must be pretty powerful, because I still get my stomache all tensed up around the real mccoy although I think they can be quite pretty. I have only fakes here!

[Karen W.]

My experience was much like Jim Bobs, Id say and truly agree with him!

[Hadrian]

 


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[Karen W.]

Hadrian that was so funny, I think that Daddy is going to need some counciling before he is ever going to be able to accept that little guy as his own! But look at that little face, who couldn't love that? Ahhh!!
  That was very good! very funny! I have to keep this one for my collection

[Hadrian]

quote:Originally posted by Karen W.

Hadrian that was so funny, I think that Daddy is going to need some counciling before he is ever going to be able to accept that little guy as his own! But look at that little face, who couldn't love that? Ahhh!!
  That was very good! very funny! I have to keep this one for my collection

Thanks Karen I gave me a smile too!  

Which came first the egg or the elephant?
 
 


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[neilep (OP)]

That would be so cute if elephants laid eggs !......

.....can you imagine them sitting on the eggs to keep them warm ?...

....especially if they are tree dwelling elephants !! []

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[Hadrian]

Can you imagine how big and hard they have to be if their parents were going to sit on them!   [][][]
 


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[neilep (OP)]

Clearly the eggs are quite large  !![]

Source: Scrambled Egg News

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[Hadrian]

I should have known better than to have egged you on!
 


What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

[Karen W.]

Oh My Gosh Neil, I just looked back in here after not looking for awhile and that is so darn funny. You two are a crack up!
  Hadrian, I am terrible at riddles! Which came first the egg or the elephant? HUMMMMMM! I'm afraid I am steping into something over my head! Do Tell?