Chickens are stupid

My friend Karen is a vegetarian, and when her mother was alive she was quite supportive of this.  With one exception.  “You should eat chickens. They’re stupid.”

While the blog has dabbled in chickens before, I don’t know much about their origins.  Are chickens similar to turkeys, in that they have a wild counterpart which is much more intelligent?  They’d have to be, because dumb doesn’t get any dumber than domesticated chickens, I now know.

My sister has four chickens as pets, who I hadn’t met before.  They are Buddhist chickens. Stupid Buddhist chickens.  They are so stupid it’s charming.

The chickens enjoy the freedom of Kirsten’s large, fenced-in back yard, where they ceaselessly wander and scratch and peck at the ground all day unless distracted by something.  It’s easy to be distracted by something when everything is constantly new; when you seemingly have no capacity for memory.

Distracted from their exploration of the hammock, they wander away. Soon they'll notice a new hammock.

Wandering along pecking, one will catch sight of a patio chair.  A new patio chair, a patio chair never seen before.  She’ll squawk a bit and ruffle her feathers.  “What the hell is that?  What. The hell. Is that?”   She seems to say to her Buddhist Chicken girlfriends.  They pow-wow a bit, and then walk quickly towards the chair to examine it. 

“What IS it?  What’s under here?  And up here? Did you see this? Did you SEE THIS?”  Intensely curious, they’ll explore the patio chair until something on the ground grabs their attention, and they’ll wander away, pecking.   Until one catches site of a brand new patio chair, never seen before. 

The hammock, the pet rabbit, a soccer ball, a tree.  All endlessly interesting, all endlessly new.  All day, every day. They were delightful, and I found them endlessly interesting and their antics endlessly new.