Pea Brain Gets It

Last night when I couldn't fall asleep, my brain was racing with things. One of those thoughts was how lucky I was to be raised on a farm. It wasn't filled with cows or fields of corn. It was modest acreage with a horse, dogs, ducks, guinea hens, rabbits, and at one time chickens...

When my father acquired said chickens, he did so without my mother's approval and it was a rift between them for a while, but even my mother came to appreciate aspects of the chickens as time went on. In fact she was the one observing them and pointed out much of what I'm going to tell you.

There was a problem though, as anyone who has raised chickens knows, there is a certain rooster to hen ratio that has to be maintained. In general there should be 10 hens to each rooster and they will kill each other off till they reach that ratio. My father had far too many roosters. Before the chick invasion my father had a coop for the ducks and guinea hens, but with this influx of fighsty fowl, my father had to quickly construct a new and larger coop for the chickens.

What happened next was interesting. Most of the males fought and scrapped with each other over the females and were generally dirty violent things. Their hens were often missing feathers and looked pretty rough. But there was a single rooster. He was smaller, and he had only a few hens. During the day the chickens roamed around and did their thing. At night they were cooped up to protect against foxes and other nocturnal predators.

This smaller rooster stood apart, and moved himself with his humble family into the smaller coop. He shared it with the ducks and guinea hens. He cleaned it. Before his mates got into their nests he cleaned it out and doted on them. He was very tender with his children and his mates. He seemed to take pride in his home and tend to it and his family. In return his hens and children seemed much closer to him, because he was closer. This sweet little bird had made for itself a family, while the rest of the multitude of chickens were fighting and living in squalor. Standing apart from the "norm" this little rooster accepted those into his home that were different than him. He was often seen with his children, until one day he was carried off by a hawk. A fox mistook the other coop for fast food, and the farm's chicken population was not long lived.

Still I think about that one little rooster. If you have ever seen a chicken's brain compared to its eyeballs, the eyes are actually larger. In fact there is a chicken called "Headless Mike" who survived having his head chopped off for up to a year. Thus I often joke that chickens were meant to be walking food. Then you take this one rooster with a brain smaller than the size of a pea, and he "got it" more than some of us supposedly highly evolved creatures. Whatever you have in the way of family, in the way of loved ones, no matter how modest, you tend to them ... you love them ... and you never know WHO on the outside looking in will see, and be affected by it. Such is the power of a life well lived... even for a chicken.