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Mike The Headless Chicken
(actually, a Rooster)
Salmon Faverolle
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VISIT OUR PAGE ON CHICKENS IN ART & CULTURE
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Don't Eat This High Priced Processed "JUNK"
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Chickens as Architectural Wonders like this Chicken Church!
Three Great Reads for the New Year (2026)
There really was, improbably enough, a chicken that lived after losing its head. In the 1940s, a rooster named Mike in Colorado narrowly escaped becoming dinner when an axe stroke missed enough of his brain stem for him to remain alive and partially functional. Mike survived for more than a year, moving about in his damaged state while his owner transported him around the country as a curiosity. In Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them, Tove Danovich treats Mike with sympathy, while acknowledging that his strange survival story did chickens no favors in the public imagination.
Danovich argues that chickens are perceptive, emotionally responsive animals and laments how easily they are dismissed as ridiculous. Philip Levy shares this concern in Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens, writing that one of his aims is to make people reconsider laughing at them. Still, chickens have long been a reliable source of humor, and repetition has done nothing to dull that effect. In fact, some breeds seem almost engineered for comedy. Danovich keeps a Salmon Faverolle, whose extravagant white beard gives it the air of a Santa Claus in miniature; the breed is often nicknamed “the clown of the coop.” Gina G. Warren, in Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement, describes Silkies as birds with halo-like head feathers that lay eggs unreliably, are useless for meat, and stagger about “like intoxicated dinosaurs,” offering far more amusement than utility.
Ask a roomful of chicken experts whether the chicken or the egg came first, and they will confidently answer: the egg. Long before chickens existed, a not-quite-chicken laid an egg containing a mutation that edged closer to what we now recognize as a chicken. Over many generations, this incremental process produced the bird we know today. Humans began domesticating chickens roughly three to three and a half millennia ago, descendants of the red jungle fowl that still inhabits parts of Southeast Asia. Once captured, chickens were easy to transport, and people carried them along migration routes and trade networks. They had reached Jerusalem by the time of the New Testament, making the rooster’s crow after Peter’s denial at least biologically plausible. Later, a pope decreed that churches should place roosters at their highest points, giving us the familiar weather vane as a symbol of human weakness.
Selective breeding transformed chickens’ appearance over time. Many lost the jungle fowl’s camouflage and became white or patterned in black and white, like the Plymouth Rock and Dominique breeds common on early American farms. Then, in mid-nineteenth-century Boston, an obsession known as Hen Fever took hold. Returning whaling ships brought exotic birds from the South Seas—Malays, Chittaprats, Bengallers—unlike anything Americans had seen. The Shanghai chicken, later called the Brahma, towered over other breeds, with thick, fur-like feathers extending down its legs. Herman Melville likened it to a regal figure from a lavish opera.
Well-to-do Bostonians with private yards rushed to collect these birds, and the craze spread to other cities. Backyard chicken keeping was briefly fashionable and legal. When enthusiasm waned, chickens became associated with poorer and immigrant neighborhoods, where families kept them primarily for eggs. After germ theory took hold, urban chickens were increasingly seen as health hazards, and by the early twentieth century many cities banned them outright.
Americans themselves consumed relatively little chicken until World War II—around ten pounds per person annually. Wartime rationing redirected beef to soldiers, encouraging civilians to eat poultry instead. By 1943, chicken consumption had jumped, and it continued climbing after the war. Chickens shifted from barnyard animals to industrial commodities. Production moved south, to warmer regions with cheap land and labor, where massive facilities replaced barns. Meat chickens (broilers) and egg-laying hens were raised in enormous numbers, the latter confined to crowded cages known as batteries.
One of the most consequential events in chicken history arrived in 1983 with McDonald’s introduction of the Chicken McNugget. As concerns about red meat grew and beef sales declined, the fast-food chain turned to processed chicken. The nugget redefined chicken as portable, boneless, and heavily engineered—breaded, fried, frozen, reheated. It was fattier than hamburger by weight, but wildly successful. Fast-food chicken exploded, and by the early 1990s Americans were eating more chicken than beef. Today, chicken accounts for nearly half of all meat consumed in the U.S. This transformation has been global. KFC’s Colonel Sanders became an international icon, and chickens now outnumber all other land vertebrates. Roughly 26 billion are alive at any moment, with more than twice that number slaughtered annually. By biomass, poultry make up the vast majority of the world’s birds. Humanity might reasonably be described as a chicken-centered civilization.
Against this industrial backdrop, backyard chicken keeping reemerged in the late twentieth century. Martha Stewart featured her own birds decades ago, and interest has grown steadily since. Unlike industrial farming, which relies on a handful of optimized breeds, backyard flocks celebrate diversity, often reviving rare or ornamental chickens. This small-scale practice has helped preserve breeds that might otherwise disappear. Danovich traces her own fascination to family history. Her grandmother grew up on a North Dakota farm where income from ducks and White Leghorns paid for household luxuries like piano lessons. After moving from Brooklyn to Portland—a city famous not just for dog parks but for backyard chickens—Danovich ordered chicks by mail, as Americans have done since the early twentieth century. Newly hatched chicks survive shipping thanks to residual yolk nourishment, and hatcheries now offer dozens of varieties.
Touring the Murray McMurray Hatchery, Danovich confronts the scale and harsh realities of the industry. Most cities ban roosters, yet hatcheries inevitably produce them. Sexing chicks requires trained specialists examining their cloacae—a difficult task with imperfect accuracy. In egg-production facilities, male chicks are routinely killed, often by maceration. Globally, billions die each year because they have no economic value. Roosters, more broadly, have little place in modern systems. Their name itself is a polite substitute for “cock,” adopted centuries ago. Aggressive behavior and loud crowing make them unwelcome in cities, and confiscated fighting roosters are usually euthanized. Sanctuaries struggle to take them in. As one caretaker tells Danovich bluntly, roosters are doomed by circumstance. Danovich’s emotional bond with her chickens is central to her book. She writes candidly about living with depression and anxiety, and about how tending her flock creates a rare sense of calm and presence. During the Covid lockdowns, watching her birds became a daily refuge. She adopted two former battery hens—“ex-bats”—named Thelma and Louise, who initially seemed hollowed out by their former lives. Gradually, they recovered some vitality. Their physical damage remained. Beak trimming left Thelma unable to peck normally, forcing her to eat awkwardly and drink water in dramatic arcs. Danovich’s attention to such details makes it hard to dismiss chickens as mindless creatures.
Levy, by contrast, maintains more distance. After his sole chicken is taken by a predator early in Yard Birds, he turns his focus outward, examining the social meaning of the backyard chicken revival. He views it skeptically, seeing it as a hobby embraced by the affluent to add authenticity to comfortable lives. He traces the phenomenon through chicken-themed tourism, luxury coops, and consumer excess. His travels take him from Detroit, where an artist breeds a global hybrid chicken, to Ybor City, Florida, where feral chickens coexist with tourists and unhoused residents. The birds are tolerated partly because no one can catch them—and partly because they’ve become local mascots. Levy ends in Brooklyn, observing the annual kaparot ritual, in which chickens are sacrificed as part of Yom Kippur observance. Tens of thousands of birds are killed, often leaving streets littered with remains. Protesters object on ethical and sanitary grounds, citing salmonella risks. Chickens, Levy notes, are the planet’s largest reservoir of the bacteria.
Despite his critiques, Levy ultimately defends backyard chickens on practical grounds, especially in an era shaped by Covid and food insecurity. Chickens provide eggs, pleasure, and a tangible link between cities and sustenance.
Gina Warren takes the argument further. For her, raising chickens is explicitly political—a rejection of industrial food systems. Unlike Danovich, she does not shy away from slaughtering her birds and documenting the process in painful detail. Her account of killing chickens she has raised herself is harrowing, and deliberately so. The emotional cost is part of the ethics she embraces.
In Hatched, Warren insists that conscious consumption demands confrontation, not avoidance. Her stance contrasts sharply with the sentimentality surrounding most backyard flocks. Yet she shares the same conviction: that keeping chickens restores agency. Behind every pampered backyard hen stands the unimaginable suffering of billions of others. Most chickens live and die in conditions of extreme confinement, and many are wasted as food. Backyard birds, spared the slaughterhouse, are usually considered companions first and producers second.
As someone who has raised chickens as egg-laying pets and have come to appreciate their unique qualities and personalities, I agree with Warren that raising chickens, especially where you have assigned them names and appreciate their agency, promotes consideration of our own agency and responsibility to care for “others.” I therefore, wholeheartedly endorse getting a small flock, especially where children are involved. In a well-maintained coop and yard, the risk of Salmonella is negligible if proper hygiene is practiced. And, yes, you can and should give your chickens a hug every once in a while. These three books are all a worthwhile read. I am providing links for your convenience.
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Ian Frazier for his review “Bang the Drumstick Slowly”, New York Review of Books, February 12, 2026 issue, for bringing these works to my attention.
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