♪romantic string music♪
[chicken clucking]
-I believe that people one day, hopefully will understand,
as I do, all children and adults,
how wonderful a little chicken can be.
All chickens.
That they're not just a little chicken in the barnyard to eat
-- no, they have a special personality.
May you all have the same joy I have had,
knowing a chicken.
[kiss] My little soulmate.
[clucking]
♪idyllic string music♪
[dog barking]
-[Janet VO] We have a lovely little saltwater farm,
right on the Atlantic Ocean.
It's a wonderful place, and it's quiet,
and we all love it,
and it's in Maine so it gets pretty cold in
the winter, but the animals do well here,
and so do the plants, and so do I.
It's heaven.
We have 16 chickens here, and they're all very different.
-[Janet] Ready to go, girls?
-[Janet VO] Late in the afternoon,
I always let them out -- free range -- which is lots of fun,
and they just love that.
[chickens clucking]
They're just all over the place, pecking at little bugs,
and pecking at flowers, and pecking dust bats,
and just being very busy.
[chicken squawking]
They all have individual personalities: some of them are
very quiet and rather submissive,
and there are others that are gregarious,
and they want to talk, and they want to ask questions,
and they sort of strut around.
They do things that are almost human sometimes.
-Hey, girl.
Are we supposed to be in here?
Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo.
Come on! Shoo, shoo!
There you go.
Oh, good girl!
-[Janet VO] They're my friends.
-You found a cricket? All right, go ahead.
-[Janet VO] The chickens really are my friends.
-Go on! Back.
There you go.
-One afternoon, I let all the chickens out to graze outside,
and cruise around, and it was very, very cold.
And, it had been forecast that we were going to have a
Nor'easter.
♪ominous orchestral music♪
The weather became very raw,
and it started to snow, so I said to Dog Martha,
I said, "we better call the girls in."
-Chickee!
Chick chick chick chick chick chick, chickee!
Chickee!
♪♪♪
-So, we did call them, and everybody came but this one --
number seven.
-Chickee! Chickee!
-[Janet VO] And I said, "Martha, you're going to have
to find this other chicken, 'cause
I don't have any idea where she is."
So, she did.
She looked everywhere and, finally,
she said, "Oh, here we are, here's the chicken."
[dog barking]
Sure, enough, there she was.
But the poor, dear thing was lying on her back,
just frozen -- like the kind you'd find in a grocery store.
So, we dragged her out with one of the rakes,
and we brought her to the house, so that we could put her in a
box and bury her when the snow lets up a little bit.
Poor thing.
I was going to put her in a shoebox,
but her feet were stuck way up in the air,
frozen, so...what to do?
And so, we put her in the kitchen on a table,
and I did some housework, and came back in about an hour.
And the legs were still pretty stiff.
But I looked at her more carefully,
and I found that she had a little throb on her neck,
a little pulse.
-My God!
She's alive!
-[Janet VO] So, I got the hot water bottle and put her on her
back on that.
She was breathing about four times a minute,
so I thought, "Well, by golly!
You'd better-- you'd better give her CPR."
That I didn't know too much about,
but I'd seen it on television, on these doctor shows.
-One, two, three, four.
-[Janet VO] So, I gave some good,
swift, "one, two, three, four!"
and I pried her little beak open,
and I did give her mouth to beak.
I did this for quite a number of times.
In three hours, she was back in business again,
and stood up and was looking for dinner.
[chucken clucking]
I gave her a lot of hugs, and I told her she's going to be okay,
and...we were going to take care of her.
-We brought you back.
♪inspirational music♪
I had a baby crib, which I put up in the living room.
[chicken clucking]
And she stayed in this baby crib for a whole week until she got
her strength back, and she seemed to be having a good time.
She enjoyed watching television very much.
[medical machine beeping]
And, of course, that's where we got all the idea of doing the
CPR for her.
This is how I learned how to do it.
♪yodeling and banjo music♪
♪ominous synth music♪
[machine whirring]
♪♪♪
[chicks chirping]
♪ethereal choral music♪
[rooster crowing]
♪gentle banjo music♪
-[Joseph] There we go, come on!
-[Joseph VO] I raise chickens because I like to know where my
family's food is coming from.
I want to be closer to the whole chain of life.
♪♪♪
Just as my garden, to put the seed in the ground and finally
eat the vegetable, I raise thechicken and we
finally eat the chicken.
And so, I'm part of the whole cycle of the food chain,
and it gives me a sense of well-being.
-[Joseph] Hello, girls. How you doing?
Good morning to you.
-[Joseph VO] I could have chosen many other kinds of animals to
devote my energies to, but chickens have a kind of energy
that excites me, and it brings life to the farm,
and I enjoy that.
-Chick chick chick chick chick.
-[Joseph VO] Most of the day I let them run free,
but they're as free as I am out on the farm.
[chickens clucking]
Many of the chickens here live a great life.
I can tell, not only from the flavor of the meat,
and the quality of their eggs, but in just their sense
of well-being.
These are very happy chickens.
My dominant chicken, of course, is Moon Rooster,
who rules the roost -- literally.
[rooster crowing]
Moon Rooster seems to mainly be interested in
protecting his flock.
If there's a strange sound, they'll look to him,
and look to the sound.
He's a signal-bearer for danger.
He keeps track of every hen all day long.
He seems to be most vicarious, perhaps like some of us,
in the morning, and he will start courting some of the hens:
scraping and strutting around them,
and then leap on them, you know?
And, um, mate with them.
So, Moon Rooster is the one who's both father figure and
also [chuckling] lover, I guess.
[chickens clucking]
-The rooster's main call is he makes a crow sound which is
[imitates rooster call]
Most of the time, he flaps his chest before he crows.
[imitates rooster]
Main ritual he has is the mating dance,
and how he gets a hen to come over is he lures her by making a
sound when he finds a piece of grain or something.
[clucking like rooster]
[rooster clucking]
-[imitating rooster]
-[Joel VO] Then the hen will come running in,
and she's picking up the grain or whatever,
and then he does a dance around her by putting one wing down,
and one leg up.
And it's...[imitating rooster call]
And at that point they'll either mate,
or the hen will run from him.
[chickens squawking]
And then if he mates with her, afterward it's [slapping chest]
[imitating crowing]
[rooster crowing]
[slapping chest]
[imitating crowing]
[rooster crowing]
-It sounded like a train wreck, it sounded like small children
being choked.
-They kind of sound like they're tearing their guts out.
-Long fingernails pulling on a blackboard.
-You find yourself walking around with your fists clenched
and your body clenched.
-It was with us all the time; we could not get away from it.
It's-- it's when you're washing the dishes,
it's when you're sleeping, it's when you're talking to friends,
it's when you're taking a walk.
-And then you go, "Oh, it's the noise in the background.
It's the roosters."
[roosters crowing]
-It started four years ago, and the Webbs had moved in in
approximately November, and in February they started erecting
these structures -- I knew what they were.
They were getting ready to raise fighting cocks.
And so, three months later, 25 roosters arrived and-- and
it started.
[roosters crowing]
-[John VO] The noise was just a constant din starting at about
four thirty, five o'clock in the morning,
and it would go on 'til about seven or eight at night and
start back up in the morning.
-There was never a time where it was completely silent -- I could
remember during a rainstorm at three o'clock in the morning,
you still would hear a lone rooster crowing.
They just never stopped.
[chorus of roosters crowing]
-[John VO] It's something that one can't maybe clearly identify
what the sound is, but is just an extremely annoying
sound overall.
You know, something that basically almost
hits you emotionally.
[roosters crowing]
-It was like Chinese water torture;
it was like having these little drips just falling on your
forehead at regular intervals.
-A rooster is not a beautiful songbird, okay?
When it yells, it's yelling for a mate.
It's claiming territory.
It wants to be heard.
What the man who was raising the roosters heard was money.
He heard gambling.
What we heard was a sound of...
loss of our property value,
a loss of our peace and quiet.
Just kind of a destruction of our home.
[wind chimes]
The problem with the rooster noise was that it was foreground
noise, so we set up wind chimes, we set up noise machines,
we rigged fountains, we did all kinds of things to shift the
rooster's noise to the background.
♪gentle guitar strumming♪
-In the morning, I would immediately get annoyed.
I'd just think, "Roosters!
You know, "Why do I even have to think about roosters?
Already-- I just got up, and already I'm thinking
about roosters.
I don't want to think about roosters."
-It made me angry.
It made me angry that someone could come into our nice
neighborhood and think that we were so stupid that they were
going to get away with something that was just--
I was just-- it blew my mind.
[roosters crowing loudly]
It was obnoxious at 20 roosters, or at 28.
[roosters crowing loudly]
When it got to be 100 roosters, it was insane.
[roosters crowing loudly]
-[David VO] It's not something I could passively listen to.
Things needed to be done.
"How am I going to get rid of these things?
What's the plan, what are we going to do?"
-People talked about parachuting in poison and...
letting minks loose over there, and ferrets.
Other people said, "I'd just crawl over there with a gun and
just start taking them out one by one."
I never really found out a whole lot about Bobby Wayne Webb,
he's kind of a mysterious guy.
-[Bobby VO] I enjoy raising roosters very much.
To me, raising that rooster from a little baby chick to its full
grown, seeing what it turns out to be,
it's like raising a kid to me.
I just love-- love full one.
♪tender guitar music♪
It's a lot of care, and a lot of hard work,
if you want to have a real pretty rooster.
♪♪♪
The only time they crow is early in the morning at daybreak,
that's what we call their waking up...
[rooster crowing]
and then in the evening, when they're going to sleep and I'm
feeding them, they crow.
That's when they mostly do all their crowing.
I think it's a lovely sound myself.
[rooster crowing]
-Well, that crow is a challenge to all the other roosters that
are in hearing distance.
"I'm here.
I intend to stay here, and there ain't nobody can do anything
about it."
They've got two purposes in life,
the way I see it: their main purpose in life is to reproduce.
[roosters crowing]
The other purpose they have in life is to kill another rooster.
They just hate another rooster.
That's the way they came out the jungle in Asia.
They don't get into scrimmages just for the fun of it,
every scrimmage they get into is a life-or-death situation.
One of them's going to walk away alive,
and the other's going to walk away dead.
[birds chirping]
-[David VO] Well, I'm quite a student of Eastern philosophies,
and one of the books I read was on 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu,
a Japanese war lord.
And he wrote this doctrine on how to defeat an enemy.
[wind chimes]
Sun Tzu emphasized the need to get allies -- one on one,
you could not win, you needed six-to-one,
ten-to-one in order to win.
♪dramatic string music♪
So, I got Alex, I got the neighbors,
I got the county prosecutor, I got the newspaper.
-[Bobby VO] You know, I just heard rumors saying I was in the
Mafia and stuff -- saying I was cock fighting down here,
you know?
They started them rumors by going around and telling all the
neighbors, trying to get them to sign a complaint.
I moved here, you know, I talked to the zoning people and made
sure everything was all right, and they said there'd be no
problems, so I went to start raising the chickens.
[rooster crowing]
Next thing I know, I was being sued.
[gavel strikes]
-First, we tried to sue him through zoning -- we lost in
that endeavor -- then we switched to suing him as
a nuisance.
-[David VO] I hired Brian Doy to record the number of crows as
they occurred throughout the day.
This was evidence that we used in the court case.
[roosters crowing]
We estimated that there was approximately 20,000 crows in
a day.
-I can't believe that.
I think it was just-- they didn't want me here.
[gavel strikes]
♪melancholy harmonica music♪
-[John VO] No reasonable person should have to listen to this
kind of noise, and the judge agreed.
It took a long time winding through the court,
but it ultimately did work.
I hate to be ethno-centric, but you know you're a redneck if
you're raising roosters for cockfighting.
-It's taking a deep breath and going,
"Wow, we really won.
Wow, this is really great.
This is how it was, you know, three years ago."
We're happy.
This is the country.
♪tense pensive guitar♪
-[Bobby VO] I think they are about a bunch of whiny yuppies.
You live in an agricultural area,
that's what agricultural areas are for.
I mean, if you don't like the sound of a rooster crowing,
why would you want to move to the country?
♪♪♪
[hens clucking]
-[Joseph VO] The hens first order of business in their day
is laying eggs.
[hen clucking]
Then, they'll do other things for comfort: they'll find shady
spots in hot times of the day.
[hens clucking]
They love their dust baths, you'll see them shooting dust
into the air and fluffing their feathers,
and it gets the dust right next to their skin,
and it helps them kill lice and other vermin next to their skin.
Every day, we have to gather eggs,
or they spoil.
-[child] I wonder how many there are.
-But with the free-ranging chickens,
it's a little bit more adventurous than it is when you
have them in a hen house, when you know where the eggs are.
The chickens are remarkable in what they produce every day.
And they're beautiful, they're delicious,
they look very different from what you buy at the
grocery stores.
-I found another one!
[bees buzzing]
[children laughing]
♪yodeling and banjo strumming♪
[chickens clucking]
-Hi, everybody.
This is Cotton the Rooster.
♪smooth jazzy music♪
Cotton the Rooster has been with me,
oh, about seven years, and he's really my soulmate.
I fell in love with him, and he fell in love with me.
Right, Cotton?
He's such a little sweetheart.
This is a very special little chickee.
As you can see, this is my baby.
♪♪♪
Knowing a chicken is something very special.
They're just not here on this Earth to eat,
they're here because they're beautiful creatures
of the universe.
♪♪♪
[chicken clucking]
-[Karin] There we are, darling.
-[Karin VO] Here's a poem I wrote: "For My Cotton Rooster."
Each day, a beautiful white rooster called Cotton
arises crowing.
He has such love and happiness.
He has such a joy exuding from his whole beautiful being.
[blow dryer]
I never even knew
a human that was filled
with so much love and joy,
so great to greet me each morning.
-[Karin] All done!
You look beautiful.
There you go! You're all finished.
Off we go!
♪cheerful music♪
Oh, Cotton, look!
Isn't it a beautiful day?
We're going on a wonderful ride.
Aren't you happy?
He really thinks he's a human.
He doesn't notice the difference,
because he does all the things we do.
You know, he wants to get up on the bed,
and go to sleep there, and wants to eat with us.
In fact, he'll jump up on the table when we're eating and...
he eats just about everything I eat.
Corn on the cob, that's his favorite, and...
oh, he loves a good McDonald's!
Though, I don't have that too much,
because I'm not a junk-eater. [chuckles]
♪upbeat music♪
-[Joseph VO] I've watched a little bit of what the hens eat.
Sometimes, of course, they'll go on the driveway and just fill up
on rocks because that's how they eat -- they don't
have any teeth.
Nutritionally, they know exactly what they need.
They'll take, for example, one dandelion fluff,
and then they'll move to another weed and take a little piece of
a leaf, and also little pieces of dirt or something I can't see
because their eyesight is just fabulous.
Like living microscopes.
They'll also chase anything that moves,
so they're very good at taking moths and flies and mosquitos
and everything like that -- they're always after things that
are moving.
♪orchestral music♪
-[Karin VO] When I leave the house,
I always leave the television on for him,
so he can watch television.
Or, I leave on classical music.
Of course he loves Pavarotti.
♪operatic singing♪
They're so intelligent, I mean they're just like dogs and cats.
Well, I've heard of them being house-broken, too.
But he has a little panty on, just in case he would have a
little accident.
The panties -- how do they work?
I tie them here, see it comes?
Here it is!
Just tie it under the wing, get it very comfortable,
and then just come right through,
and I put a little diaper pad inside.
-[Joseph VO] We can't always judge animals from our own kind
of intelligence.
Chickens have their own chicken intelligence.
Chicken instincts.
They have a sense of affection for each other,
and I know that they communicate like you and I communicate.
They have a wide variety of sounds: scolding sounds,
come hither sounds, sounds of surprise and shock.
-If we could just see the beauty of a chicken,
a chicken's personality, that they're not just in a barnyard,
they're here for a reason.
It is a beautiful, beautiful gift to us on this Earth.
♪mellow jazzy music♪
-What happened when the press got a hold of it was
rather-- rather scary to me because I had never had any
experience with anything like this before.
Her fame went very fast, I got calls from people from all over
the country: talk shows, DJs...
we went by satellite to Guam, we went by satellite
to Australia and Nepal.
It also wound up in Moscow.
And, I think, there was a lot of interest in the story at the
time because there were a lot of things that were going on that
were not particularly pleasant in the media.
The trial of OJ Simpson was happening...
-[woman on TV] ...found Orenthal James Simpson not guilty of the
crime of murder...
-[Janet VO] And I think people were just kind of fed up and
needed a story that was homey, and a Cinderella story,
if you will, that did work out.
[chickens clucking]
♪serene flute music♪
After she got some good strong feathers and was back on her
feet, I thought that she deserved a little better than
just "Number Seven," so we decided to call her
"Valerie" for her valley.
"Queen Val," maybe, I don't know.
But "Valerie" it was.
And she has responded to that name ever since.
When she went back into the coop, all those girls were
astounded to see her.
They all sort of crowded around, and it was like a
town meeting, you know?
Everybody was talk, talk, talking.
"Where have you been for a week?"
"Let's hear where you've been, what you've been doing."
"You were gone quite a while, where were you?"
"Tell us about it! Tell us about it!"
She said, "Well, I have had a real experience,
let me tell you."
And so Valerie, I guess, told them that she'd been in the
house, and things had been very nice and she was watching
television, and she had good meals,
and lots of love.
It was just delightful.
There was a friend that I had here locally,
and she knew someone that was an animal communicator,
and so she called him and she asked him if he would be willing
to ask Valerie a couple of questions.
♪ethereal music♪
The first question is, "When you were frozen,
had you been going down a tunnel with a light at the end?
And, if so, why would you come back?"
And so, Valerie said to him, "Yes, indeed.
[heartbeat thumping]
I did go down the tunnel.
♪♪♪
I got pretty close to the end, where the light was,
and then I was told, 'You must go back.'
♪♪♪
And I realized that I had been put on this farm,
not just to lay eggs, but to prove to people that with love
and with caring, miracles do happen."
♪inspirational music♪
[seagulls cawing]
♪gentle guitar music♪
-[Elwynjohn VO] Mr. Olsen was a really enjoyable man to talk to.
I always made a special point to come by and see him because I
was little, and I asked him how his chicken, was and he said,
"All good things gotta come to an end."
I really did know for sure what happened to the chicken.
It was a strange episode.
He was headless.
Headless rooster.
That was how the story goes.
-[Clyde VO] Headless chicken -- bull.
But the proof is in the pudding.
I went out and seen it two or three times.
-[Harold VO] He was a great rooster.
Once upon a time and a half, but it's kind of hard
for anybody to believe.
But it's true.
Yeah. It is true.
[service bell ringing]
♪upbeat guitar music♪
-[Troy VO] Back in the 40s, when my grandparents were running the
farm, they raised fryer roosters,
fryer hens, and they would slaughter a few of them at a
time for their own use and then they would sell them.
My grandfather would chop the heads off,
and my grandmother would start picking and
cleaning the feathers.
Well, he would just keep chopping and throwing them down
there in the pile, then they got to the end, and once there was
a live one walking around.
Now he told me that, you know, on occasion,
one would get out and flop around and maybe live for a few
minutes, but they'd always go ahead and die,
but they had one that didn't die.
-Any normal man would reach down and pick him up and cut his damn
head off -- again.
But not Ollie.
He pick him up, stopped him from bleeding,
and that was his headless chicken.
That was Mike.
-[Troy VO] And after it lived for two or three days and was
getting along fine, of course, neighbors started finding out
about it, coming to see him, and people started hearing about it.
-You'd get a six-pack of beer and go up there and you'd get to
see the rooster.
-That's when I started thinking, "Boy,
I'd like to have that."
I'd seen a two-headed calf before at a fair.
But not anything without a head.
I mean, that's impossible.
-[Troy VO] A gentleman by the name of H.B. Wade had heard
about it, and he was in the business of promoting
different things, and he got in touch with my grandparents and
convinced them there might be a little money made in it -- in
taking it to side shows and things like that.
Mike was on exhibit in Salt Lake,
out in California, was shown in Phoenix.
-[Clyde VO] They showed him several times in Chicago,
Florida, Atlanta, and New York on the East Coast.
-[Troy VO] They had dreams of making money
off of this rooster.
-[Clyde VO] Seattle, Fresco, LA, on the west coast.
-[Troy VO] And paying the farm off,
and getting it out of debt, and buying new farm equipment.
-[Clyde VO] And then I understand -- now don't hold me
to this -- that it went overseas to England.
[steamboat whistling]
[crowd cheering]
-He was a real rooster, though; he was a real pappy.
And spoiled rotten after a few months.
Nothing but the best for Mike, because he was worth
lots of money.
-Mike had, other than being taken around to the side shows,
tried to live a normal life.
[chickens clucking]
When they still had him on the farm,
they let him roost with the rest of the chickens.
He would go out and try to prune himself with his head -- with
his neck, really, 'cause he didn't have no head like a
chicken would.
He would try crowing, which was more of a gurgling sound,
the way my grandfather described it.
They would feed him by hand, crack corn,
and through his esophagus.
And used an old eye dropper to give him water,
so he did require some attention,
but pretty much he was like a normal chicken even though he
didn't have a head.
I think Lloyd and Claire thought that they were in the money --
that they were going to go off and seek their fortune,
and retire off of this rooster.
Mike drew a pretty good crowd at the sideshows,
be it people that were just interested or thought it was
a hoax.
He had a lot of publicity about him,
and a lot of bad publicity, too.
My grandparents received a lot of hate mail after that Miracle
Mike was published in Life Magazine.
A lot of people thought it was cruel to keep him alive,
that they should have just went ahead and finished the job and
put him in the cooking pot.
-[Elwynjohn VO] He was a healthy chicken,
all of the time that he was around.
But they still blamed Olly.
"You should have cut his damn head off!"
[laughs]
But he didn't do that.
He kept him.
-[Troy VO] Lloyd always thought that it could have made him,
you know, a lot of money, and it really never did.
Mike had a problem sometimes, he would start choking or
strangling on its own mucous and they kept a little eye dropper
handy to suck that out so he wouldn't strangle to death.
If I remember how the story goes right,
one night they had forgot this eye dropper at the side show.
They had him back at the motel room and he
started gurgling and strangling, and before they could find
anything to keep him from strangling,
he choked to death.
♪somber harmonica music♪
Their dreams were kind of crushed.
They'd made just enough to buy him a new farm tractor, and to
finish paying off a little bit of land that he still owed some
money on.
I really don't know what to think of why Mike lived.
Was it just fate?
Did this one particular rooster have just that much
will to live?
Or was it just because he was so a dumb of an animal that
he didn't even know his head was cut off?
I think it's one of those mysterious of life,
really, why it happened.
♪♪♪
-[Joseph VO] In order to eat a chicken,
you have to kill a chicken.
Now there's just no easy way around that.
I tried to do it as easily on them as possible;
I try to respect them all the way through the process,
up to the table.
All farmers take this as a matter of course.
I guess I feel a little bit odd about speaking about killing,
because I know many, many people have no experience of this all.
It's very difficult for them to see it as not being cruel,
but I don't see it as being cruel.
I see it as necessary.
[chickens clucking]
Somebody's doing it.
If you eat meat, somebody is harvesting that creature
for you.
♪serene guitar music♪
[chicken clucking]
♪♪♪
-Well, let's have a toast to our chicken tonight, okay?
Here we go: to our beautiful chicken feeding us tonight.
[glasses clinking]
There we go.
♪♪♪
-[Joseph VO] There's a sense of wholeness about growing your own
food, and the chickens remind me every day that it's not just
me in this world.
It helps me stay attuned to those things that are important
to me, like cycles of life and death,
of happiness and sadness -- just everything that makes a
life rich.
It keeps me connected to things outside of myself.
[church bells ringing]
[chicken clucking]
-[Pastor Joseph VO] It's strange how we pick up
certain expressions.
From the time I was a little kid,
one of the worst forms of deration
was to be called "chicken."
The quickest way to get a fight started was to use this name
against a target of ridicule.
The implication was always that a chicken was a coward,
or lacking in courage.
♪curious playful music♪
Many people have never really known a chicken -- I mean, the
feathered bird commonly found on the farms.
♪♪♪
I have been fortunate to be around chickens much of my life.
And have formed a close bond with several.
One of the more memorable was Liza.
[hens clucking]
Liza was a Japanese Silkie bantam.
She was about half the size of the average barnyard hen,
but big in her love for life, as well as her
unfailing determination.
Her feathers were snow-white, fluffy,
almost fur-like.
A patch of feathers perched atop her head like a comical crown.
Her dark eyes sparkled with life,
and as I later realized, a great depth of chicken wisdom.
One aspect of life, however, seemed to elude
Liza: motherhood.
She laid eggs regularly -- tiny bantam eggs not much larger
than marbles.
But her diminutive size put her at a great disadvantage with the
other chickens.
The larger hens always crowded around her nest before the
required 21-day incubation period.
[hens clucking]
As the new mothers would introduce their brood to the
real world, Liza would attempt to take over the duties
of mother.
♪curious playful music♪
As a result, she took a great deal of abuse from
the other chickens.
[hens squawking]
♪♪♪
I felt a compassion for Liza.
Sensing how desperately she wanted to experience motherhood,
I attempted to help her by making a nest from the others.
Liza readily accepted it, and began laying eggs.
However, I soon discovered the eggs broken,
and contents eaten.
Liza began exhibiting signs of great distress.
She erratically checked empty nests,
clucked in a strange, monotonous way.
Realizing that something had to be done,
I constructed a miniature chicken house,
complete with all the amenities: food,
water, and a private nest that would be the envy of any
chicken's eye.
Liza settled in to her new home and immediately began depositing
eggs in the nest at the rate of one a day until she had six.
She then went into the setting mode: plucking feathers from her
breast to line the nest, and expose her warm,
moist skin to the eggs.
Finally, the eggs began to hatch.
[chicks chirping]
The baby chicks were unbelievably small;
it was difficult to count them.
But they seemed to disappear almost immediately into the
fluffy feathers beneath Liza's wings and breast.
There never was a mother more devoted,
more thrilled, or more suited to the task at hand.
Liza was fairly glowing with the pride and joy of motherhood.
I kept the little family in their confined space for
a few days.
Reluctant to allow them out into the real world filled with so
much danger.
Liza pleaded with every motion of her body to take her new
family out into the world.
♪inspirational music♪
She paced back and forth at the door until I gave in,
and opened their lives to a world filled with green grass,
warm moist earth, and more juicy bugs than most of us care to
know about.
[chicks chirping]
♪♪♪
True to my expectations, Liza was the ideal mother.
She showed her little family the very best places to search for
seeds and grain.
From sun up to sun down, she was tireless in searching out the
very best for her brood.
I felt quite good about the perfection of it all,
the absolute order in God's universe.
The demonstration of life as it should be.
It was during one of these moments of reflection that I was
shocked into a broader understanding of our true
relationship with God's creatures.
♪suspenseful music♪
As I stood one morning, looking out over the field beyond our
kitchen window, and absently watching the scattered group of
chickens going about their routine,
I saw the entire community of chickens freeze.
[chickens clucking]
The total population of chickens scattered across the field,
reactive of one mind, as a blur of feathered body dived beneath
any available cover.
I knew this activity indicated the close presence of a hawk.
♪dramatic music♪
Then something caught my eye...
♪suspenseful music♪
I saw the look of panic in Liza's dark eyes
as she started to run for the overhang of
the chicken house.
Suddenly, the same thought struck us both.
-[whispering] The babies.
[chicks chirping]
-[Pastor Joseph VO] I vicariously lived the agonizing
moment with Liza as she broke stride and turned back to the
six tiny chicks still pecking in the grass,
oblivious in their infancy to the event happening around them.
With one command from Liza, the babies instantly rushed beneath
her outstretched wings.
I've tried to interpret the expression I saw come over her.
Was it resignation?
Perhaps surrender?
Or was it releasing, and putting the outcome into the hands of a
higher power?
[hawk screeching]
♪suspenseful music♪
As I slowly and reluctantly walked toward the spot,
I was impacted by the immensity of what I perceived
to have happened...
♪♪♪
I had just witnessed a chicken perform a deed that
would make headlines if the same act had been performed
by a human.
Liza had overcome the so-called survival instinct,
and with precision of forethought,
offered her life for another.
The phrase entered my mind: "No greater love."
♪inspirational music♪
There was a creature that many educated and philosophic people
had declared not only to have no soul,
but to be without the capability of thinking or reasoning.
♪♪♪
[chicks chirping]
Yet Liza had performed the supreme,
heroic, and selfless act.
[chick chirping]
I stood looking down at the pile of feather in the grass
and weeds.
As I touched the mound of feathers,
a startling and unexpected thing happened.
Apparently, misjudging the depth and thickness of her coat,
the hawk had missed.
♪♪♪
As I watched Liza and her chicks calmly continue with their
routine of the day, I realized that I could never think of a
chicken in the same way again.
Not everyone will have such a dramatic decision as Liza,
but at some point in our lives, we will all have an encounter
with our hawk, and we will each have a choice about how we face
that hawk.
♪♪♪
I believe that I must set an example,
and I hope to confront any situation with the grace,
dignity, and confidence in God that I witnessed in Liza.
I know now that I would be honored to be called "chicken."
♪"Chicken" by Mississippi John Hurt♪
♪♪♪