Teaching Chickens To Write

Cotton was my old man’s whole life. He grew it for fifty years, and from the time he plowed with mules until the day he shipped his last bale from his own gin, he devoted every waking minute to his crops.

So … for the life of him he couldn’t understand why I was interested in other things. Over the many years I managed his farm and gin, he often remarked, “If that boy paid as much attention to this farm as he does to his honeybees, garden, ducks, geese, turkeys, guineas and chickens — why, he might amount to sumpin’. Especially those chickens. Shoot … he even talks to ’em!” I got my fondness for fowl from Mama. She wouldn’t think of buying meat, eggs or vegetables when she could produce them herself, and early on she taught me how to care for chickens. Late each afternoon, her feed call would incite a stampede among the huge flock as they flapped toward her from all across the pecan grove, squawking a serenade that was music to her ears. She talked to her chickens, and so did I.

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One day I saw a photo of Araucana hens in a poultry magazine. “Originally bred in Argentina — guaranteed to lay blue eggs in a variety of shades,” the advertisement said. I ordered fifty biddies. Mama was skeptical, but like me she couldn’t wait for the Araucanas to start laying, hoping the hen fruit really would be blue. That day I ran into her kitchen with a cobalt blue egg, she immediately began calling all her friends and describing it as if I had brought her a gift from the Rajah of India. Word spread, and folks began buying my blue eggs as fast as the hens could lay them, especially around Easter time. I converted an old cotton house into the “Chicken Hilton,” as the neighbors called it, and like Mama, I always talked to the flock at feeding time. I remembered studying how the Russian physiologist Pavlov elicited conditioned responses from dogs by making certain sounds just prior to giving them favorite snacks, so I decided to conduct a similar experiment with the Araucanas. Whole kernel corn hypnotizes chickens. Knowing this, I would walk slowly around the Chicken Hilton each day, dropping kernels and singing a little ditty: “Go ’round the house, go ’round the house.” Soon, I could drive my truck up to the chicken yard fence, roll down the window, sing the ditty, and the hens would start trotting around the house, cackling cacophonously. Pavlov was right. “You gotta see it to believe it,” folks all over town were saying. “He not only talks to his chickens, but they understand him!” Dad was flabbergasted. Watching me commune with the chickens one day, he said to a fellow farmer, “Mercy! I’ve got a manager who sells blue eggs laid by hens from a foreign country that understand him when he talks. Next thing you know, he’ll be teaching chickens to write.”