Seventy years ago, a farmer beheaded a chicken in
Colorado, and it refused to die. Mike, as the bird
became known, survived for 18 months and
became famous. But how did he live without a head
for so long, asks Chris Stokel-Walker.
On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife
Clara were killing chickens, on their farm in Fruita,
Colorado. Olsen would decapitate the birds, his wife
would clean them up. But one of the 40 or 50
animals that went under Olsen's hatchet that day
didn't behave like the rest.
"They got down to the end and had one who was still
alive, up and walking around," says the couple's
great-grandson, Troy Waters, himself a farmer in
Fruita. The chicken kicked and ran, and didn't stop.
It was placed in an old apple box on the farm's
screened porch for the night, and when Lloyd Olsen
woke the following morning, he stepped outside to see
what had happened. "The damn thing was still
alive," says Waters.
"It's part of our weird family history," says Christa
Waters, his wife.
Waters heard the story as a boy, when his bedridden
great-grandfather came to live in his parents' house.
The two had adjacent bedrooms, and the old man,
often sleepless, would talk for hours.
"He took the chicken carcasses to town to sell them
at the meat market," Waters says.
"He took this rooster with him - and back then he
was still using the horse and wagon quite a bit. He
threw it in the wagon, took the chicken in with him
and started betting people beer or something that he
had a live headless chicken."
Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous
headless bird. The local paper dispatched a reporter
to interview Olsen, and two weeks later a sideshow
promoter called Hope Wade travelled nearly 300
miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. He had a simple
proposition: take the chicken on to the sideshow
circuit - they could make some money.
"Back then in the 1940s, they had a small farm and
were struggling," Waters says. "Lloyd said, 'What
the hell - we might as well.'"
First they visited Salt Lake City and the University of
Utah, where the chicken was put through a battery of
tests. Rumour has it that university scientists
surgically removed the heads of many other chickens 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.
The bird's travels were carefully documented by Clara
in a scrapbook that is preserved in the Waters's gun
safe today.
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.
What happens when a chicken's head is chopped
off?
Beheading disconnects the brain from the rest of
the body, but for a short period the spinal cord
circuits still have residual oxygen.
Without input from the brain these circuits start
spontaneously. "The neurons become active, the
legs start moving," says Dr Tom Smulders of
Newcastle University.
Usually the chicken is lying down when this
happens, but in rare cases, neurons will fire a
motor programme of running.
"The chicken will indeed run for a little while,"
says Smulders. "But not for 18 months, more like
15 minutes or so."
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.
"For years he would claim he had sold [the chicken]
to a guy in the sideshow circuit," Waters says,
before pausing. "It wasn't until, well, a few years
before he died that he finally admitted to me one night
that it died on him. I think he didn't ever want to
admit he screwed up and let the proverbial goose that
lays golden eggs die on him."
Olsen would never tell what he did with the dead
bird. "I'm willing to bet he got flipped out in the
desert somewhere between here and Phoenix, on the
side of the road, probably eaten by coyotes,"
Waters says.
But by any measure Mike, bred as a fryer chicken,
had a good innings. How had he been able to survive
for so 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.
It was suggested at the time that Mike survived the
blow because part or all of the brain stem remained
attached to his body. Since then science has evolved,
and what was then called the brain stem has been
found to be part of the brain proper.
"Most of the bird brain as we know it now would
actually be considered the brain stem back then,"
Smulders says.
"The names that had been given to parts of the bird
brain in the late 1800s were all indicating
equivalences with the mammalian brain that were in
fact wrong."
Why those who tried to create a Mike of their own
did not succeed is hard to explain. It seems the cut,
in Mike's case, came in just the right place, and a
timely blood clot luckily prevented him bleeding to
death.
Troy Waters suspects that his great-grandfather
tried to replicate his success with the hatchet a few
times.
Certainly, others did. A neighbour who lived up the
road would buy up any chickens for sale at an auction
in nearby Grand Junction, Colorado, and stop by the
family farm with a six-pack of beer for Olsen, to
persuade him to explain exactly how he did it.
"I remember [him] telling me, laughing, that he got
free beer every other weekend because the neighbour
was sure he got filthy rich off this chicken," Waters
says.
"Filthy rich" was an opinion many held in Fruita of
the Olsen family. But according to Waters, that was
an exaggeration.
"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.
Waters once asked Lloyd Olsen if he had fun. "He
said, 'Oh yeah, I had a chance to travel around and
see parts of the country I probably otherwise
wouldn't have seen. I was able to modernise and
have farm equipment.' But it was something he put in
his past.
"He still farmed the rest of his life, scratched a
living out of the dirt."
source: BBC.com

faith551
martyns303
flokii
stfuareyouGod
primeministerr
murphyibiam15
Queennikky
sameer1212
chandli
naijaboiy
julianne10
Lalasticlala
tosyne2much
vizkiz
cutehector
roctation
ugliest
farano
Alienstar
jolllyjoy
Decker
fajani
pretydiva
moezzy
donTbone
obiorathesubtle
osedvgirl
tunchi101
misspicy2
pweetychyka
potestdeus
Afrok
ajinoride
nature8
fistking01
johnsown
mzztega
donbenedict
iceberylin
20bc
cupidhero
twaci
Davidmoyes
ceenoEvu
dyn1800
deetus
ishilove
seun
mynd44
r231
slimbless

Lies

www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34198390

mvalentine:
Lies

and you can Google it

2odd:


www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34198390

and you can Google it

and why would I do that?

mvalentine:
and why would I do that?

it gets on my nerve when I talk to assholes like u.

2odd:

it gets on my nerve when I talk to assholes like u.

prick-head

Living up to 18months? That's weird.

This chicken is like many Nigerians sha. Headless, without a brain and surviving the odds, better than those with a head and brain.

Wow

too long... summary please

Animal Cruelty.!

Wow! quiet rare