What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird
by Sy Montgomery
Atria Books (November 05, 2024) 9781668047361
Imagine: You are lying on the ground, once again attempting to fix the ancient riding lawnmower you inherited from your home’s previous owner. Just beyond the narrow space between the grass and the machine’s metal undercarriage, movement catches your eye. Scaley, reptilian, yellow feet, heavily armed with long, pointed claws—and, just above the toes, curved, knife-sharp spurs—are purposefully striding toward you at face level. It feels like that scene from Jurassic Park, where the humans are hiding from the hunting Velociraptor—an animal from which, in fact, your avian assailant is descended.
You have been detected. The ominous feet hurry now, pounding the ground in a frenzy. There is no mistaking it: this is a rooster on a rampage—the bane of many an otherwise peaceful barnyard.
Unless you’re on the receiving end of those spurs, it may look, at least to others, hilarious: a two-foot-tall bird, mostly made of air, weighing only six pounds, can easily scare a 150-pound, six-foot-tall human into running away. But an angry rooster can draw blood. What should you do?
Years ago, my husband joined the ranks of the many backyard chicken farmers, their kids, and their visitors, who have been unexpectedly confronted with this very dilemma. His quite reasonable reaction was, like most of our poultry-keeping colleagues, to spring to his feet and hastily get out of the way.
But now, many years later, my neighbor, Ashley Naglie, suggests a different course of action—one that is staggeringly counter-intuitive:
In this situation, “it’s best,” she insists, “to pick them up.”
What?
“Cuddle them,” she continues. “Talk to them in a soft voice. Do your chores while you’re holding them close.” Watch out for the beak, she advises, because he might bite. If possible, wrap the rooster’s feet in a towel or a blanket to protect yourself from his spurs. But gathering the angry bird into your arms and carrying him around is, she assures, the best and only foolproof way to train a rowdy rooster to become a loving friend.
By the time I spoke with Ashley, my husband and I had lived among chickens for decades, including the occasional rooster or two. The guys had all started out as sweet baby chicks, turned into affectionate and assertive young cockerels–and some of them remained perfect gentlemen their whole lives. But occasionally we’d get one who “turned.” Then, what?
We’d never heard of Ashley’s training method. When we began keeping chickens in the late 1980s–way before the internet with its advice for all matters at your fingertips, way before the pandemic craze for backyard poultry—we had no idea how to contend with a rooster gone rogue other than to find him another home. Now we know what to do.
Our travels in what I call the Chicken Universe, as you shall see in the following pages, has been a multi-decade voyage, a journey of revelation. New discoveries continue to this day.