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Hypnotized Chickens and the Myth of Progress
Beware of a simple story
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can trap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
- Jorge Luis Borges
The world is full of predators
Many of them prefer a hot meal. The sudden snap of vertebra between the jaws; the hot gush of blood. For many creatures on our planet, the only way to eat is to eat something alive.
Chickens know this. At least, some dim memory of it exists in their compromised and manipulated DNA. Staying still is a defense strategy against predation. It doesn’t always work. But it’s better at least to try.
And so you can hypnotize a chicken. Quite easily. YouTube is full of videos of giggling farmhands drawing lines in the dirt that have the power to mesmerize poultry.
Wikipedia has an entire page on chicken hypnotism which includes tidbits like the US military practice they call hypnotizing chickens. When they’re trying to avoid telling reporters something important, they bore them into torpor with a meaningless PowerPoint presentation, a high-tech line in the sand designed to make the eyes glass over. Like the TV teachers used to wheel in when they couldn’t be bothered to teach a lesson. Like the meetings…
