Bird brain

With all the recent happenings on bird flu, brings to mind, 'bird brain' or the IQ of a chicken.

Where I grew up as a boy, families would rear chicken in the backyard. Cycling along the road, I would see chicken scratching by the wayside. Often I would hit a stone or a hole which would alarm the chicken. Hearing the noise, the startled chicken would immediately run smack into my wheel. I will then see a flattened chicken askewed between the spokes, head and feet splayed in a most grotesque manner. Stupid chicken! It will run straight into the noise instead of away from it. Is this what chicken-hearted mean?

When I was doing survival training in the air force, we were divided into small teams. On the beach one day, we were given a live chicken each team for lunch. The task of killing the chicken and cooking it fell on me. How do you kill a live chicken? Someone in another team decided to lop the chicken's head off. The chicken took off with several guys running after it! Question: where is the chicken's brain?

With a stick, I decided to carve out a little canal on the sand. Placing the chicken's neck on the canal, I placed a stick across the neck. Stepping on both ends of the stick, I grabbed the chicken's legs and gave a mighty heave. Without any sound, the chicken went limp and the legs turned cold. Next, I ripped the feathers and skin off the whole chicken and emptied all the entrails into a pit. The head, backside and feet went as well, and the lot buried in the sand. The chopped up chicken was placed inside a mess tin with a little water and two cubes of crushed OXO cubes. To seal in the chicken, masking tape was put round the sides and the whole mess tin placed inside a make-shift oven. The oven was nothing more than a hole previously dug on the ground with stones placed inside and a big fire started. After a few hours of burning, the stones became white hot. Covering the mess tin with these hot stones, the whole thing was buried under the sand. The site was of course marked with two sticks like a cross. Some team forgot to mark the site and at lunch time, could not find the chicken. Poor guys spent the afternoon digging the beach for their chicken!

During my flying days, I used to drop supplies to the troops in the jungle. Live chickens were dropped. Each crate would hold up to 250 pounds of live chicken. When the chickens were first crated up, they were all alive. When the crate arrived at the airfield, about 5% of the chicken would have died of stress and noise. After the crate has been loaded on to the aircraft, another 5% would have died of heart failure. During the drop, if everything went off well, the crate and the surviving chicken would make it to the cooking pot. If the parachute failed to open, a situation called 'candle' (like a white candle), the crate would smash to the ground. The situation became very hilarious when all the men on the ground would start to chase and catch the live chicken. I did such a drop for the Gurkhas, when we had a 'candle'. All the Gurkhas on the ground pulled their kukries and started to chopped at the flapping chickens. No sense giving the chickens to the terrorists. Which is more stupid - a chicken or a turkey?

Till then....