A chicken flew into my arms. I didn’t even know that chickens could fly, and suddenly one was landing on me. It happened when I was visiting a farm sanctuary. If I had been younger I would have asked my parents if I could take her home, please! After all, she chose me. Never mind that she chose everybody; she was a particularly friendly chicken. She made soft, strange cooing sounds and nestled into my arms like a happy kitten. I was won over. This was no ordinary chicken, I decided.
In fact she was an ordinary chicken, but simply one who had no reason to believe that people were after her. This is how chickens and humans would relate to one another if one was not exploited and the other doing the exploiting. Very much like cats and dogs. They just wait for the chance.
When I tell this story to people, they look bewildered. “But it’s just a chicken:’ (They seem to feel uncomfortable using “he” or “she” instead of the impersonal”it” to refer to a chicken, as if giving chickens a gender would make them too personal or too real.) There is a beautiful called The Fairest Fowl, which contains photographs by Tamara Staples of championship chickens. When people see personality and emotion in the photos, they are accused of reading human emotions into chickens: “I think I begin to understand why the people who breed birds have no interest in photos that show chickens‘ true personalities,” writes Ira Glass Chickens, he says, “may be capable of affection or loyalty or maybe even pride, but if so, they feel these feelings in an ancient and birdlike way, like glassy-eyed visitors from another world:’ It is true that chickens are visitors from another world, but that world lies just around the corner, just a hair-breadth from human contempt. If we could drop our arrogance for just a moment, we might gain a glimpse of this other, mysterious yet enchanting world.
We read some animals so easily. Dogs, for example. We know dogs like having us around; they tell us so in ways that we understand. Charles Darwin recognized that dogs have at least four different barks to convey their feelings to us, but dogs are not the only animal species that talk. In The Descent of Man, Darwin reports, quoting the biologist Jean Charles Houzeau, that “the domestic fowl utters at least a dozen significant sounds,” Significant, Darwin would say, to each other. It would perhaps have been too great a logical leap for Darwin to wonder if chickens, like dogs, might be attempting to communicate with us while we have not been listening to them.” We take it for granted that dogs want to be part of our lives; but is it not also possible that the same is true of chickens and that we have not heard their requests because we have failed to understand their language Darwin was impressed by the sense of humor displayed by dogs when they tease us, urging us to approach them with a stick lying nearby. When we come close, they run off with the stick and wait for us to try again to get hold of it, their tails wagging with delight in the game they are playing with us. Chickens, some people say, will never play with us. But how do we know this if we have never given them the opportunity? How many people have ever treated a chicken as they do a dog?
In fact, if we are to believe William Grimes, the restaurant critic for the New York Times, who has talked about a delightful about an intense relationship he had with a large black Australorp chicken who took up residence one day in his backyard in Astoria, Queens, some chickens actually have a highly developed sense of humor. He writes that this particular Chicken (the name he gave her) seemed to have had an appetite for play: “Was it pure coincidence that she liked to sneak up on Yowzer, the cat most likely to develop a nervous twitch when caught unawares? Time after time I saw the Chicken trot up delicately when Yowzer had his back turned, squawk a couple of times, and then watch as the cat leaped a couple of vertical feet. The Chicken, after a successful ambush, would run off jauntily, with a cackle that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle:’ “
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