(Don't get fooled by chickens pitiful looks. As long as chickens have access to outdoor run, they will always look pathetically fluffless on rainy days, because they choose to go outside despite the rain. As a firm believer in chickens' free will, I don't try to stop them.)
But there is one new, super interesting observation from today:
Rain affects either chickens' ability to fly or their ability to think.
I couldn't yet figure out which one.
This observation was made thanks to Christine, the Explorer Destroyer Chicken who often flies over the fence to a "Chickens Forbidden" area. There she conducts various illegal activities.
When it's lunch time, all chickens sprint to the coop to get to food as fast as possible and grab the best pieces before everyone else. But Christine is usually playing alone in the forbidden area, separated from the rest of us by a fence, so if she wants to eat, it's not enough for her to sprint, she also has to fly over the fence.
For most chickens, this is a problem. Chickens have trouble understanding the concept of a detour - taking a longer route to get to one's destination, rather than the shortest one. If the destination is right in front of chicken's eyes, in chicken logic it must be reachable by the shortest available route - straight line. Anything else would involve temporarily distancing oneself from the destination, and is therefore (in chicken logic) incorrect.
Obviously, if there is a fence separating a chicken and her destination, only the longer route (flying over the fence) is the option, but this is extremely difficult for chickens to grasp.
This has never been a problem for Christine, though. Except for a few early instances, she has always been able to find her way from the forbidden area to food by the longer route - until today. Today, she couldn't make it! She didn't know how to get to us from behind the fence. She was frantically running back and forth along the fence, as you can see in the latter part of this video:
As the only difference compared to all other days is the presence of rain, Christine's sudden inability can only be explained by the rain. Rain impaired either her ability of logical reasoning, or her ability to fly.
For those worried about Christine's well being: Don't worry, she wasn't left hungry. She was immediately helped back to the run, where she joined her fellow gobblers, as shown in the following video, taken about five minutes after the previous one. (Christine is in the center, the one with yellow ring on her left leg, suspiciously watching the camera. )
Both hypotheses (does the rain affect flying, or thinking?) will be tested on the next rainy occasion. Chickenology is a serious science.
I conjecture the rain inhibited Christine's ability to fly - leading to panic - ergo compromising her ability to think, subsequently. The soaking in the rain could have made her wings heavy and aerodynamics problematic.
ReplyDeleteThat's a plausible explanation. One fact that doesn't fit is that next day, sunny and dry, Christine couldn't make it again. That was a surprise. But on the following days, she again could. Maybe there's some hidden variable that we're missing altogether. (chickenology and quantum mechanics have something in common :D )
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