Chickens

“[Chickens] may be capable of affection or loyalty or maybe even pride, but if so, they feel these feelings in an ancient and birdlike way, like glassy-eyed visitors from another world.”

“Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.”

“The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act. For the person who knows something about animals it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow-cage mates to search there in vain for cover.”

“Then there are those proverbial “bird brains” of the barnyard, chickens, surely the most maligned and abused animal on the face of the earth, and—just as surely—among the brightest, most social birds we'll find anywhere. … Chickens not only are capable of learning, they are also capable of teaching one another. It turns out that chickens are not as dumb as popular mythology makes them out to be.”

“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.”

“Good-morrow to thy sable beak,Cock of the heath, so wildly shy!”

“While the cock with lively dinStoutly struts his dames before.”

“The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,Awake the god of day.”

“The early village cockHath twice done salutation to the morn.”

“Hark, hark! I hearCry, cock-a-diddle-dow.”

“Alas! my child, where is the PenWhose Egg is Mightier than the Pen.”