Tag Archives: Chickens

Chicken or Egg

IMG_20130223_114236
Egg or Chicken, Chicken or Egg?????????

The Matticus Kingdom’s first ever Tug of War

A fantastically fabulous blogger from a magical kingdom has come up with a great idea to challenge the masses, a tug of war.

Always up for a challenge I accept wholeheartedly. The inaugural question was what came first, the chicken or the egg?

This was a softball to me, because of my rudimentary understanding of biology and evolution.  The world has my excellent experience in the public education system of the 1970’s and 80’s to thank for this detailed answer.

The Chicken Wins

The Chicken of Course!!!
The Chicken of Course!!!

There are several arguments I could make. If I believed the religious teachings I heard every Sunday as a youth, God made chickens and chickens make eggs and that is the end of the story.  That would make it simple, even if it makes no sense an leaves a “few” gaps.

That answer never satisfied me so I looked to education for my answer.  As I understand life it worked something like this.

 

There was a Big Bang! (just had to get that reference in here)

Just looking at my drawing. The big bang looks like a fried egg, or a pile of pooh. We'll stick with fried egg. :_)
Just looking at my drawing. The big bang looks like a fried egg, or a pile of pooh. We’ll stick with fried egg. :_)

The Earth and the atmosphere formed.

Life started to evolve.

Life begins
Life begins

Where it came from, now that is debatable but here we are, not debatable. (at least we think we are here)

Life was made up of single cell organisms who due to environmental influences started to evolve over time to become more proficient at survival.

Things started to Evolve
Things started to Evolve

Many forms of life evolved, why they didn’t just all turn into people or monkeys or dinosaurs, or chickens is a bit unclear to me, but what do you expect from a free education.

Now these single celled organisms multiplied through cell division.  Over time cells bonded together to form multicell organisms.  Some of these primitive life forms eventually evolved into chickens.

The Chicken may die, yet the eggs live on.
The Chicken may die, yet the eggs live on.

The early chickens found an evolutionary benefit to developing their young in eggs outside of their bodies, so it is clear that the Chicken definitely came first!

Fighting the Angry Chicken

I just wanted to ask, “How was your day?”

There are many times in life when you have to fight to be a man, today was not one of those days.  As I was minding my own business, thinking about enjoying the warm weather and getting some work done. I was interrupted by the gentle clucking of chickens outside.  The place where I am fortunate enough to work has their own chickens, that they do get their own eggs from, and so they serve a purpose.  I have seen them almost daily, and my interactions with them have until today been of the most perfunctory in nature.

So this takes us to today, I hear the chickens clucking away outside, and I decided that I should go out and talk to them and see what all the clucking was about.  I mean there must

chickens are mad
I was simply acting like the chickens, I guess I must have done too good a job.

have been something happening.  So I approached the herd of chickens like I always did, with a friendly disposition and the intent of just saying, “Hello chickens, what is happening on this beautiful November day?”

The conversation started much as I thought it would, I milled about with the chickens and made my own fake clucking sound, thinking this would ingratiate me with the rest of the flock.  Seeing no animosity, I took that as encouragement and started to duck my head and

chicken attacks
Out of nowhere, like a shark, he attacked!! I reacted with bravery as you can see.

mimic the motions the fowl were making.  This turned out to be a bad idea.  As one of the roosters took this action to be a threat I think.

Out of nowhere he pecked at my shoe.  Which more startled me than scared me.  This chicken was really mad at my shoe apparently as he continued to attack.  I tried to reason with the chicken and calmly explained that I didn’t mean any harm and if he went away I might bring him some food.  He didn’t buy it so  I of course went into my natural defense mode, which is reminiscent of the crane technique from the movie the Karate Kid.  Mr. Miyagi said when you do this right, there is no defense.  He obviously had never tussled with an angry chicken before.

I hoped he would get bored and stop his attack before I had to get serious and move to the second part of my self defense training.  (The fetal position)  Fortunately I was able to stay

crane technique
I instinctively practiced the crane technique from the Karate Kid, it seemed appropriate due to the opponent.

 

calm and stop laughing long enough to think of an acceptable exit strategy.

The irony was heavy on my mind that I was running away from an overly combatant chicken: Who was the chicken?   I did learn that if a chicken does start to attack you, if you run away, they will not be able to follow you very far and they will immediately attack your friend who was taking pictures of that whole incident.  So it all worked out in the end I got away with out being harmed by a chicken or doing harm to a chicken.  I also haven’t laughed so hard in a long time.

Running away from the chicken
I showed him who the better chicken was! How do you defeat a chicken?  You become one!