Is the Headless Chicken Stupid?

Mike and his manager, Hope Wade
[Photo Credit]The most popular post of all time here at Rebecca Writes is not one of the theological posts I spent hours (or days) wrestling with, but this silly little thing from six years ago. Every day, people google “headless chicken” and land on this post. Tonight I’m removing a few dead links, updating it, and reposting.

If you need confirmation of the stupidity of the human race, look at the search queries people use. Last week, for instance, someone came here as a result of a really dumb one: life span of headless chicken. 

At least I thought it was dumb until I investigated. If you click on the query above, there’s a link to www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthe longestdomainnameatlonglast.com. Of course, I clicked. Who wouldn’t? 

This is the go-to place for information about longest stuff, like the longest female beard ever (Way to go, Vivian!), the longest parasite (Kudos to Sally Mae Wallace.), or the world’s longest dog tongue (Good girl, Brandy.). It’s at this informative site I discovered that the stupid search query might not be so stupid after all.

It turns out that the longest life span of a headless chicken is eighteen months.

In Fruita, Colorado, on September 10 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen was sent out to kill a chicken for dinner. His mother-in-law loved to eat the neck, so Mr. Olsen tried to chop off as little of the neck as possible. With a swing of his axe, off came the head. The chicken, now known as ‘Mike the Headless Chicken’, started to run around as chickens do, but never stopped.

And when Mike did finally keel over, it was, by all accounts, an untimely death.

Mike finally died in 1947, after living for 18 months. He started choking in the middle of the night, and since the Olsen’s left the syringes they used to clear his esophagus at the sideshow, they could not save him.

Who knows how long Mike might have lived were it not for the unfortunate choking incident — although some might say he was already living on borrowed time.

Mike the Headless Chicken has a song written for him. You can listen to it sung

or read the lyrics below. I suggest the latter option.

(You played the video anyway, didn’t you?)

The Cluck Stops Here: The Ballad of Mike the Headless Chicken

©2006, Julianne Mangin, Carol E. Rand

INTRO:
Mike the headless
Mike the headless
Mike the headless chicken! (2x)

He was just another nameless chicken
Scratching in his barnyard pen
Nothing much to live for
Just some food, and a little hen
He didn’t know what a hatchet was
Or what a skillet was for
But one false whack of the farmer’s axe
Made him a metaphor

CHORUS:
MIKE! MIKE! MIKE! MIKE!
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken
Mike the headless chicken*
(*leave off the last word, in the final chorus)

Mike the headless chicken
Lost his head but found his fame
Mike the headless chicken
That’s why he got a name
He was headed for the kitchen
When fortune made its strike
How could they cook a chicken
As remarkable as Mike?

CHORUS

Even folks from far away
Knew the chicken who survived
Mike traveled the sideshow circuit
In 1945
Kept alive by an eyedropper
Food and water down his gullet
He even gained a couple of pounds
Now that’s a healthy pullet

CHORUS

Eighteen months without a head
Was enough for Miracle Mike
He didn’t even get a headstone
I can’t imagine why
He lived and died in the forties
Times were different then
Yet now we have celebrities
With no more brains than him

CHORUS (last)

Yes, the song is stupid; I’m guessing the headless chicken was stupid, too. But the search query wasn’t.

Update: Since I first wrote about Headless Mike Chicken, he has starred in his own full length documentary motion picture, Chick Flick, a film that is “an inspiration for all who view it.” (Think about it: Mike suffered a serious injury—a head amputation, no less—and went on to live a meaningful and profitable life.) There’s also a yearly festival held in Mike’s honour. More stupidity? I’ll let you decide.

Theological Term of the Week

invisible church
“[T]he company of those who truly believe in Jesus Christ and are the recipients of salvation, both those who are currently alive and those who have died.”1

• From scripture:

 But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” … . (2 Timothy 2:19 ESV)

• From The Westminster Larger Catechism: 

Q. 64. What is the invisible church?

A. The invisible church is the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one under Christ the head.

Q. 65. What special benefits do the members of the invisible church enjoy by Christ?

A. The members of the invisible church by Christ enjoy union and communion with him in grace and glory.

• From Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhof:

This church is said to be invisible, because she is essentially spiritual and in her spiritual essence cannot be discerned by the physical eye; and because it is impossible to determine infallibly who do and do not belong to her. The union of believers with Christ is a mystical union; the Spirit that unites them constitutes an invisible tie; and the blessings of salvation, such as regeneration, genuine conversion, true faith, and spiritual communion with Christ, are all invisible to the natural eye; — and yet these things constitute the real forma (ideal character) of the Church. …[T]he term “invisible should be understood in this sense…

Learn more:

1. Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry: What is the church?
2. Brian Schwertley: The Visible vs. The Invisible Church
3. John Calvin: Invisible and Visible Church
4. Harmony of the Reformed Confessions: Visible/Invisible Church

Related terms:

• visible church
• universal church
• local church

Filed under Ecclesiology

1From Dictionary of Theological Terms by Donald K. McKim.

Do you have a term you’d like to see featured here as a Theological Term of the Week? If you email it to me, I’ll seriously consider using it, giving you credit for the suggestion and linking back to your blog when I do.

Clicking on the Theological Term graphic at the top of this post will take you to a list of all the previous theological terms in alphabetical order.

Round the Sphere Again: The Beginning and the End

The Problem
At For the Love of God, D. A. Carson gives brief commentary on Genesis 3.

[T]he heart of all human problems is rebellion against the God who is our Maker, whose image we bear, and whose rule we seek to overthrow. All of our problems, without exception, can be traced to this fundamental source: our rebellion and the just curse of God that we have attracted by our rebellion.

Have you ever noticed that God’s curses are related to the duties he assigned humankind before the fall? 

The Solution
It is God who will make everything right again during the second coming. Michael J. Kruger writes that it is important for believers to be future-oriented, because if we are not, we

• will forget that redemption is more than “spiritual”: Downplaying the physical aspects of redemption “can create a quasi-Gnostic spirituality amongst Christians, where the spiritual and physical are pitted against one another.”
• will lose perspective regarding the problem of evil: The second coming provides “an essential perspective without which the problem of evil could not be addressed.”
• will lack an appropriate context for personal holiness: “If we only focus on this current world, then holiness is going to seem strange and out of place… . But, what if our minds were set on another world?  What if our hearts were longing and waiting for a future world? A world where “righteousness dwells”?  If we did that, then holiness has a context where it is meaningful. Holiness and godliness make sense.”

Read the whole post at Canon Fodder for more explanation of these points.