Everything I learned about beauty and humanity I learned from chickens.
During the pandemic 30% of the people in my life got chickens, myself included. I think it was the egg shortage thing, or just being “cooped up” at home all the time. Suddenly a small food-producing farm animal in the backyard just made sense.
Anyway, if you get them while they’re small, they’re adorable. Cute, fluffy little balls that go “peep-peep-peep” all day long. If you get more than four of them, though, you are in for a lesson on our signature differentiator as a species from the dinosaurs.
When your chicks become adolescents, you move them into the coop. They’re a few months old, about ready to start laying, and you figure they should be safe since they’re surrounded by wire and wood. Then you wake up one morning to realize that the greatest threat to any “safe” organization is internal. You find the headless body of your cutest chicken, its head a mangled mess somewhere in the dirt.
I’ve talked to several owners about this and it’s ALWAYS THE CUTEST CHICKEN.
Why?
Chickens don’t care if the guy who cleans their shit plays favorites. It’s more primal than that. What we take for beauty, they see as weakness.
A cute, or beautiful, or “perfect” person tends in the case of aesthetics towards the delicate aka the vulnerable. We instinctively want to protect that, they want to destroy it.
That cute chick who retained its childlike appearance and mannerisms looks to the other birds like a stunted retard. They ain’t got time for this neoteny bullshit. They are ruthless trash-and-mice-eating reproduction machines who have one period a day and they will bond over the fact that they wiped the weakest of their brood from the face of the earth.
To a chicken, beauty is evil.
It would be easy to say, dinosaurs kill beauty and we make/preserve it. Dino bad, people good. But that’s a lie. We also destroy beauty, only we find a way to commodify and commercialize and dissociate from it. We praise our scapegoats before they are ritually sacrificed, and then we go around feeling awful about it. Look at how we treat all the teen pop stars. Guess how many Mickey Mouse Club members have been abused?
All of this is a defense against self examination and change. We don’t want to stop defiling and consuming beauty, maybe our shared genes with the chickens means that we can’t. But we have enough morality in us to feel like killing innocent, defenseless, delicate things is wrong. And yet something about us also wants to smash that flower and cover it in shit, maybe because we know that it’s the resources wasted on protecting our weakest members that will be our tribe’s undoing. Maybe because we project onto beauty our own hated vulnerability. Or maybe, like chickens, we just like stabbing things to death with our face.
Either way, we’ve figured out a way to do both, and that’s why, when the eggs stop coming, I will only feel a little bad about taking my revenge and making chicken soup out of those old hens.
It goes without saying this article was a banger Randy
ah that got me good
Man, do I have a lot to say on this subject from personal experience which I don't want to leave as a public comment on the internet!
1. based
2. ************
3. excuse me are you implying I’m not a hot girl????????????
Everything I learned about beauty and humanity I learned from chickens.
During the pandemic 30% of the people in my life got chickens, myself included. I think it was the egg shortage thing, or just being “cooped up” at home all the time. Suddenly a small food-producing farm animal in the backyard just made sense.
Anyway, if you get them while they’re small, they’re adorable. Cute, fluffy little balls that go “peep-peep-peep” all day long. If you get more than four of them, though, you are in for a lesson on our signature differentiator as a species from the dinosaurs.
When your chicks become adolescents, you move them into the coop. They’re a few months old, about ready to start laying, and you figure they should be safe since they’re surrounded by wire and wood. Then you wake up one morning to realize that the greatest threat to any “safe” organization is internal. You find the headless body of your cutest chicken, its head a mangled mess somewhere in the dirt.
I’ve talked to several owners about this and it’s ALWAYS THE CUTEST CHICKEN.
Why?
Chickens don’t care if the guy who cleans their shit plays favorites. It’s more primal than that. What we take for beauty, they see as weakness.
A cute, or beautiful, or “perfect” person tends in the case of aesthetics towards the delicate aka the vulnerable. We instinctively want to protect that, they want to destroy it.
That cute chick who retained its childlike appearance and mannerisms looks to the other birds like a stunted retard. They ain’t got time for this neoteny bullshit. They are ruthless trash-and-mice-eating reproduction machines who have one period a day and they will bond over the fact that they wiped the weakest of their brood from the face of the earth.
To a chicken, beauty is evil.
It would be easy to say, dinosaurs kill beauty and we make/preserve it. Dino bad, people good. But that’s a lie. We also destroy beauty, only we find a way to commodify and commercialize and dissociate from it. We praise our scapegoats before they are ritually sacrificed, and then we go around feeling awful about it. Look at how we treat all the teen pop stars. Guess how many Mickey Mouse Club members have been abused?
All of this is a defense against self examination and change. We don’t want to stop defiling and consuming beauty, maybe our shared genes with the chickens means that we can’t. But we have enough morality in us to feel like killing innocent, defenseless, delicate things is wrong. And yet something about us also wants to smash that flower and cover it in shit, maybe because we know that it’s the resources wasted on protecting our weakest members that will be our tribe’s undoing. Maybe because we project onto beauty our own hated vulnerability. Or maybe, like chickens, we just like stabbing things to death with our face.
Either way, we’ve figured out a way to do both, and that’s why, when the eggs stop coming, I will only feel a little bad about taking my revenge and making chicken soup out of those old hens.