On the verge of possible: A rooster who did not want to die

70 years ago, a farmer in Colorado beheaded a rooster, who refused to die. Mike, as he was called, lived another 18 months and became famous. How could he live so long without a head? The first time I found out about this story, I thought it was an unsavory joke, but it turned out to be true.

In September 1945, farmer Lloyd Olesen and his wife Clara traditionally slaughtered chickens on their Colorado farm. They classically divided their work by Lloyd doing the uglier part of the ax job while Clara cleaned the chickens.

But after a while they noticed something really unusual, namely one hen or rooster refused to accept that he had lost his head. Not knowing what to do, they put the chicken in a box and left it on the porch overnight. When they woke up in the morning they hoped that the coca had accepted the fact that she had been beheaded, but she was still there on her feet, although her head was definitely missing.

A headless chicken should be eaten!

After waking up, Lloyd went to the market to sell chicken meat, and he took a decapitated chicken with him because he wanted to joke with his acquaintances and friends and earn some beer, betting with his surroundings that he had a live headless chicken with him. Of course, he drank a lot of free beer that day. The family that decapitated the coca now faced a dilemma, what to do with a rooster that cannot eat on its own, so they started feeding it with the help of a dropper by dripping food directly into its esophagus. After feeding, they noticed that they had to clear the mucus from the chicken's throat because otherwise the chicken would start to choke. They did that part of the job with the help of a syringe. In fact, who knows what would have happened to the chicken if the story had not spread quickly and aroused the interest of first the local media and later those across the US.

The hen goes for testing

After talking to a promoter on Hope Wade television, they realized that despite the fact that their coca has no head, it can be worth its weight in gold; which is why they decided to take the case of decapitated hens more seriously, and that meant traveling across the country with a single hen. Before the trip began, they traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah, to the University there, where the coca underwent a series of tests to explain this bizarre case.

The explanation for how the hen continued to function headless is easier to find today than it was in the middle of the last century. Namely, science has meanwhile advanced in the field of chicken brains. When a man is beheaded, it means that all connection between the rest of the body and the head is lost, but in chickens it is different because very little brain is located on the front of the chicken's head. Most of the brain is located in them in the back of the skull, behind the eyes. This means that the hen lost most of her face with the blow of the ax, and thus the connection with the outside world, which she had through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, but everything else was still in function. It is believed that only a timely blood clot prevented the coca from bleeding to death.

What did that mean for her executioners?

The rooster became addicted to his executioners, who began earning about $ 4,500 a month on it. This case enabled his executioners, and now the guardians, to renew their agricultural equipment, as well as to continue their further life on and off the land more intensively and profitably thanks to it. Other farmers tried to achieve the same as Oleseni, but they did not succeed. The question is, how many chickens have ended their lives in trying to achieve the same result.

The rooster, meanwhile, was named Mike. His tour and popularity ended in death after 18 months of "walking" the world without a head. The rooster died in a motel room in Phoenix. The couple woke up suffocated, but when they looked for the syringe, they realized that they had left it at the exhibition they had been to the day before. It was the end not only of Mika but also of the travels and profits this family made on a bizarre set of circumstances.

We can only guess where Mike's body ended up, but if his executioners and guardians didn't want to cherish the memory of the rooster that made them famous, other locals did. Namely, they launched the annual ceremony, which is held every May, and dedicated it to the decapitated chicken, while in the center places placed an interesting Mike sculpture. In this way, this unfortunate poultry enabled the earnings of their executioners-guardians, and later it became a profitable "chicken" of the whole region.