Chapter 10

“I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. I’ll let you know.”

There’s no denying it, chickens are very strange creatures. To support this theory (and these are just my thoughts), I’ve rustled up a few weird chicken facts, about our feathered friends.

1: Chickens have great memories and can recognize over 100 faces.

2: Chickens have a hierarchy of bossiness, a pecking order, if you will. This term was actually coined to describe flock behavior. Every flock has a bird at the top and a bird at the bottom, and every other chook fits into the ladder in some specific place. The order is established during mating season, times of stress, and addition or loss of birds.

3: Chickens experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Which means they dream just like we do.

4: When female chicks hatch out of their egg, they come into the world with a certain number of eggs inside of them, around the age six months, they start laying them. Hens will lay several eggs a week for several years, and when all the eggs in their body are gone, they’re done laying! (And eventually end up in the crock pot.) Hens lay eggs even when they don’t live with a rooster. Hens go through the process of ovulation and egg laying almost every day.

5: In order to protect themselves from mites and clean their feathers, chickens take dust baths. They’ll find a nice patch of dirt, loosen up the soil forming a pit, and then they jump in and roll around, fluffing up their feathers and shaking about. Once they’ve had enough, they hop out of the pit, walk over to you, and shake every bit of soil and filth right in your face. Maybe they think humans need dust baths too?

6: Chickens have my vote for grossest anatomy of any creature. I bet most of you don’t know that the eggs you eat come out of something called a ‘cloaca’ or vent. This opening serves not only as a chicken vagina, but urine and feces shoot out of it too. A real multifunctional orifice. Omelet anyone?

7: Chickens are the closest known descendants to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Keeping chickens in your backyard is very much like having a bunch of tiny dinos take over your property. You can see the resemblance in a very scary way when they run at full speed. Imagine the part of Jurassic Park with the T-Rex chasing the jeep, except scaled down about 5000 percent.

8: Chickens outnumber humans three to one on this planet. Now, let’s be very nice to our bird friends so one day when they manage to form superior intelligence and take over the world, they will spare the groveling humans.

9: Chickens have their own language. Chickens make over 30 different sounds and each bird and flock has its own tone. Different sounds can mean: There’s a predator in the air! There’s a predator on the ground! I found something delicious over here! I just laid an egg! Get the hell out of my nest! Oh my god, I’m lost, I’M LOST, I DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!!! (Chickens are very dramatic creatures that are big into exclamations.)

10: Many hens make a big ol’ racket every day when they announce to the world that they are indeed going inside to lay an egg. Some people call this “the egg song” and the whole flock joins in the chorus, even if they aren’t laying an egg at that moment. It’s really quite beautiful!