X-Message-Number: 5682
Date: 29 Jan 96 21:55:03 EST
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: headless chickens

Bob Ettinger writes:

>Although I haven't seen it myself, as I understood it when I worked on a 
farm
>many years ago, chickens seldom run after their heads are cut off. When 
they
>do, it is because the head was cut too close, and part of the brain stem 
or
>upper spinal cord, containing the relevant circuits, are still there. 

Sorry, Bob, but this isn't so.  I saw chickens decapitated in my youth a 
great deal (as neighbors both raised and ate them).  I now keep chickens 
(laying hens) myself (current population = 5).  I normally buy adult laying 
hens, but used to hatch and raise.  For a number of reasons it is sometimes 
necessary to kill my chickens:

1) When I was hatching and raising my layers, 50% of the offspring would be 
roosters and I could not sex them, which meant my first hint of their sex 
was an  0500 wake-up call.  I live in a residential area UPTOWN which means 
an 0510 execution. (You can see why I stopped hatching my own layers!).  
Chickens are immobilized by grabbing them by the legs (DO NOT do this with 
ducks, geese or other aquatic birds; they are neither immobilized by this, 
nor will their delicate feet and legs tolerate the writhing around they do 
and you will end up with an animal with a broken leg or dislocated joint).

2) Sometimes illness or fighting amongst the hens results in an animal 
which must be destroyed.

3) My first-cut (no pun intended) at killing animals that needed to be 
disposed of was to use the method I had learned in my youth in Indiana, 
which was to cut off the head rapidly using an axe.  Alas, my precision at 
this (one handed) is not the best, even with a calm (foot restrained 
chicken) lying there patiently, so I tended to get the neck about half-way 
down, this is undesireable for those who eat chickens because the neck is 
edible (sort of!) and you want as much of it as you can get..  Chickens' 
bodies do indeed run around after their heads are cut off, even with a "low 
cut" like mine.

4) It is however, NOT NECESSARY for them to run around, since you can 
simply hold them for a minute or two until they bleed out (they will be 
flapping their wings madly and you might well get a little bloody, which is 
probably why most people just let em run in the barnyard).

5) I let then run because I wanted the answer to another question which has 
troubled me for sometime: how long does "consciousness" persist in the 
severed head after decapitation?  In animals undergoing anesthesia we have 
two simple wys to check roughly for level of consciousness: lash and 
corneal reflex.  Put simply, you lightly brush the lashes of the eye, or 
gently touch the eye (cornea) itself.  A conscious animal will blink in 
response to this stimulus.  It is bit more complicated than this in 
anesthesia (dogs lose or recover lash reflex first, corneal second, and 
humans vice versa, and there is a significant difference in level of 
consciousness indicated by each response between the species). I let my 
chickens' bodies go because I wanted to evaluate corneal reflex in the 
severed heads: it persists for about 2-5 seconds.

This is FAR too long for my tastes and I have stopped using decapitation as 
the method of disposing of either chickens or lab mice (the latter 
technique is still a standard, accepted method).  Nor would I recommend it 
as a method for disposing "humanely" of humans or any other animal. I note 
there is now a proposal to restore decapitation as a means of capital 
punishment in Louisiana (?).

6) As my previous post (5676) pointed out, it is well established in cats 
that the wiring and core algorithms for walking are contained in the distal 
spinal cord (below the level of the diagphram).  Evidence points to the 
same thing in human neonates, and certainly in chickens and other 
decapitated birds.

7) Given my practical experience in the matter, I would be very interested 
to see any references to the contrary.


Now, for those recoiling in horror at the above and questioning my ethics, 
I would make the following points:

1) I keep chickens because I enjoy them and because I believe free-range 
conditions are decent, and the only acceptable (to me) way to get eggs.  I 
rarely have to dispose of birds (thy have two laying cycles of about 14-16 
months each) but when I do, *I* take the responsibility for it and see the 
consequences.  It is not a task I hand off to others to do in some 
psychologically sanitized way.  As a consequence, I have learned that an 
age-old, accepted "humane" method of killing birds is not really that 
humane, and I no longer use it.  Oh yes, my lover and I, and and our other 
animals eat eggs, and believe they are generally good for people and many 
animals to eat.

2) I keep many animals, including manyy birds and reptiles, and euthanasia 
for hopelessly ill animals, or culling during breeding are facts of animal 
husbandry which cannot be escaped.  For those purists who think their hands 
are clean by eating only vegetables (I myself am an 
ovo-lacto-pisca-vegetarian) I would remind you that agriculture requires 
the plowing of fields which results in mayhem for many of the small mammals 
and reptiles dwelling there.  Read the poem "Of Mice and Men" if you want a 
graphic description of this phenomenon.  Coming to terms with our nature as 
predators and confronting first-hand the realities of life and death is, in 
my opinion, critical to a HUMANIZED and psychologically healthy society.  
It is only the least reflective amongst us who can nuture an animal and 
then kill it without reflecting on our own mortality and the nature of the 
universe at large.  It is also instructive about what "rights" really are, 
and where they come from.

I assure you, "rights" are not something found in the barnyard or in the 
wild, nor are they accorded even to animals of the same species by each 
other.  They are a construct of rational minds with carefully prioritized 
values.  Animals do NOT have rights.

But, neither is our survival, our humanity, or our agreed upon human rights 
served by callous handing of animals we eat or use for food directly or 
indirectly.  I'll take a farm 4-H kid as a neighbor who has raised a sow 
and killed her, to the typical hooligan that roams the streets of East LA 
and thinks that meat is grown on trees and has never nutured or been 
nutured by any one in his/her life, and has never contemplated and followed 
through on the taking of a life for whom s/he has had responsibility for, 
and husbanded.

As to the "self-circuit," hmmmm Bob, maybe it is in the distal spinal cord 
;).

Mike Darwin


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