Apparently there is a chicken named mike that survived 18 months with his head cut off. is this even possible?
As I recall, the chicken didn’t lose it’s entire head. There was enough of the brainstem left to support basic body functions. Chickens don’t have much by way of brains, anyway. They had to feed the chicken by hand.
Yep. Lloyd Olsen had his mother-in-law over for dinner, and she like chicken necks so he intentionally aimed a bit high when he chopped off the head. That’s how Mike ended up with enough of his brain left to continue living. He even continued to at least attempt to do some chicken-ish things, like peck for food and crow (neither of which worked very well, for obvious reasons).
Cecil covered this in a column quite a few years ago. Too lazy to search for it. It’s true.
What’s awful is that because some headless chickens made money for their owners, a lot of people tried to duplicate it, sometimes successfully, for sideshow attractions. While I don’t anthropomorphize chickens and have easily eaten enough of them to populate a farm the size of Delaware, this just seems unneccessarily cruel. (OTOH, without most of their brain, perhaps they don’t have sensation.)
Anybody else read “Mike the headless chicken” to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon”?
I tried to mic. a headless chicken. ‘Come on! Say, “Chick! Chick!”’
Never got a level.
Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.
Mike would be the headless chicken gunner.
Chickens don’t need a head to run around as any chicken farmer can attest to. Even chickens that are fully decapitated can run or flop around sometimes for quite some time literally ‘like a chicken with its head cut off’. That is a well-known saying for a reason even if most people don’t have experience decapitating chickens these days. I have done it myself and it is amazing how well and how long some of them jump around after decapitation.
What was different about Mike the Headless chicken is that he had enough brain stem left to support basic life functions and he didn’t bleed to death or die from infection from the hole where his head used to be. It would be pretty difficult to duplicate that through intentional surgery and even stranger that someone did it accidentally with an ax. The conditions that allow that may have happened more than once but most people don’t generally give a headless chicken a reprieve after they have gotten that far.
I was relating this story to someone, and they asked a good question that hadn’t occurred to me: Why didn’t Mike bleed to death?
As noted, chickens don’t have a big brain (relative to body mass) like humans, so the large volume, high-pressure blood supply that humans have through the neck isn’t present in a chicken. This allowed the blood to clot and seal off the arteries.