Mike, the Headless Chicken
Have you heard about the Mike, the Headless Chicken?
Seventy two years ago, a farmer beheaded a chicken in Colorado, USA to eat but it refused to die. Mike (The Chicken) survived for 18 months and became famous.
On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen beheaded the chicken in his farm and put it in an apple box assumed its dead (Obviously!!!). But he was shocked to see its alive the next morning.
Then what happened?
Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous headless bird. The local paper dispatched a reporter to interview Olsen, and two weeks later a promoter called Hope Wade travelled 300 miles from Salt Lake City. He had a simple deal: take the chicken on to the sideshow circuit - they could make some money.
First they made a research in the University of Utah. They have checked if they could surgically remove a chicken’s head and to see whether any would live.
It was here that Life Magazine came to marvel over the story of Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken - as he had by now been branded by Hope Wade. Then Lloyd, Clara and Mike set off on a tour of the US.
They went to California and Arizona, and Hope Wade took Mike on a tour of the south-eastern United States when the Olsens had to return to their farm to collect the harvest.
People around the country wrote letters - 40 or 50 in all - and not all positive. One compared the Olsens to Nazis, another from Alaska asked them to swap Mike's drumstick in exchange for a wooden leg. Some were addressed only to "The owners of the headless chicken in Colorado", yet still found their way to the family farm.
After the initial tour, the Olsens took Mike the Headless Chicken to Phoenix, Arizona, where disaster struck in the spring of 1947.
"That's where it died - in Phoenix," Waters says.
Mike was fed with liquid food and water that the Olsens dropped directly into his oesophagus. Another vital bodily function they helped with was clearing mucus from his throat. They fed him with a dropper, and cleared his throat with a syringe.
The night Mike died, they were woken in their motel room by the sound of the bird choking. When they looked for the syringe they realised they had left it at the sideshow, and before they could find an alternative, Mike suffocated.
But how did it survive that long?
The thing that surprises Dr Tom Smulders, a chicken expert at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle University, is that he did not bleed to death. The fact that he was able to continue functioning without a head he finds easier to explain.
For a human to lose his or her head would involve an almost total loss of the brain. For a chicken, it's rather different.
"You'd be amazed how little brain there is in the front of the head of a chicken," says Smulders.
It is mostly concentrated at the back of the skull, behind the eyes, he explains.
Reports indicate that Mike's beak, face, eyes and an ear were removed with the hatchet blow. But Smulders estimates that up to 80% of his brain by mass - and almost everything that controls the chicken's body, including heart rate, breathing, hunger and digestion - remained untouched.
How much did he earn?
"He did make a little money off it," Waters says. He bought a hay baler and two tractors, replacing his horse and mule. And also - a bit of a luxury - a 1946 Chevrolet pickup truck.
Totally weird, wasn't it?
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