Wednesday, March 15, 2006

I Love Cocks

A salaciously titled post about chickens


Having lived all of my life in highly urbanized parts of the country, my interaction with chickens has been on a limited spectrum that starts in the poultry aisle and finishes on the grill…augmented by a mastication and digestion sequence that I’ll do no more than mention.

The last two weeks, however, this abstraction—the chicken—has become a little more real to me. Not many things seem out-of-place in Santa Cruz, but when I noticed these birds strutting and pecking and squawking on the little bike path near where I work, well that was something different.

They’re a carefree little peep (the official term for a group of chickens) of three birds—two brown and one a kind of dirty white—all slight-of-build and red-headed. I’d wondered if they were boy chickens or girl chickens (or both), but a quick search of the ‘net told me that gender sorting chickens was a difficult thing and I’m not sure I have the capacity for the two most common methods. The first being feathering, a tedious method that required breed charts and feather measurements. The other is something called manual vent inspection, which is similarly tedious and, not surprisingly, “very upsetting to the bird.”

It then occurred to me then, that as with people, it’s not about the color of the feather or what kind of vent you have but rather what’s inside—the inner chicken, if you will.

After some initial reservations, we warmed to each other and found some common ground. They seemed intrigued by my bike and its funny click-click-click. I liked the practicality and stylishness of their webbed feet. They seemed impressed with the compactness of my camera. I told them I type in a manner very much like they eat. They nodded their heads in agreement.

They actually seem to be very agreeable little fowl, nodding in affirmation to just about everything I said, from the mundane…
“Live around here?” Nod, nod. “Crazy weather, huh?” Nod, nod.

…to the philosophical…
“So you agree that anxiety is existential in that it belongs to existence as such and not to abnormal state of mind?” Nod. Nod.

…to the practical…
“So yeah I think you can stretch it to 5,000 miles before you get another oil change, no problem.” Nod, nod.

The got a little testy when I admitted to having a chicken Caesar salad for lunch—I believe the word they used was “Bok!”—but all was forgotten when I promised to bring them some corn.

Yeah, I like those chickens.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like chicken too.

Anonymous said...

"Did you see the size of that chicken!?"