Uncategorized 07 May 2008 12:13 pm
My chickens will be brilliant!
This is one of those ridiculous ideas that I might actually put into practice. You know, in all the copious free time not taken up by practicing other ridiculous things.
In Mexico, there are buskers who have trained fortune-telling canaries. They’ll take out the canary from its cage, greet it, and set it down on a tiny stage; the canary flutters over to a little box, rings a bell, perhaps drags a little hat around, and selects a slip of paper with your fortune on it. Josh and his dad saw one in Guadalajara last year, which pleased his dad no end; apparently, training a canary to tell fortunes is a dying art.
I can never resist a dying art.
We don’t have a canary, but three day-old chicken chicks are being mailed to us on the 19th. And chickens, it turns out, can be surprisingly well-trained. (1, 2, 3.) Animal trainers have been using chickens for decades to help them learn to shape behaviors with clicker training. There’s at least one DVD about training chickens, and you can even go to one of several chicken camps.
Will we train our chickens to ring bells and pick up little slips of paper? It could happen. It seems like a shame to have such a trainable animal around and not train it to do something, and I think it’d be fun to learn to train an animal to do something interesting. There’s just one thing — we’d planned to eat the chickens once they’d stopped laying well. I’m not sure I can bring myself to eat a trained chicken.
on 07 May 2008 at 12:27 pm 1.jesse said …
Oh, please do this. Please please please. I will drag Emily out to the Pacific NW just to bear witness.
on 07 May 2008 at 12:30 pm 2.craig wareham n joel vogt said …
omg omg, i so want to train ducklings for joeleo now
on 07 May 2008 at 12:52 pm 3.Josh said …
If we train our chickens to be fortune tellers, we have to get a booth at the Fremont Sunday Market, or at least the University District street fair. And that way we can keep them past laying age without worrying about whether they’re pulling their weight as pets.
And, hey, I think that’s the same canary guy I saw last time I was in Mexico: my photo
on 07 May 2008 at 12:54 pm 4.Mia said …
Not to encourage such a thing or anything, but I’ve got a bunch of spare clickers around if you want ‘em.
on 07 May 2008 at 1:04 pm 5.Kristin said …
Hah! That sounds awesome. I keep picturing a chicken on one of Josh’s loteria cards…
on 07 May 2008 at 3:54 pm 6.Amanda said …
That sounds really cool!
For what it’s worth: until/unless we move to the country and end up with a passel of chickens, I am reconciled that any chickens we get will become pets. Unless, of course, they’re truly obnoxious… maybe. But at this point, I’m more in pet mode than farmer mode, and until have enough animals that farmer mode makes sense- they’re gonna be pets. It’s just realistic for me. Sigh.
I mean, I often threaten to roast obnoxious pussycats, or turn them into gloves and/or slippers, but we ALL know I won’t.
on 07 May 2008 at 9:13 pm 7.Erin said …
I enthusiastically endorse this plan. I like the image of smug geriatric chickens performing for their keep.