Chickens and People

A professor's wife kept chickens.

After years of close observation, she reached a conclusion: human society, she decided, was organised on the model of a chicken coop. She shared this discovery with her husband.

When the professor asked whether she might not be simplifying things a little too much, she replied:

"Judge for yourself. In every flock there is a large body of hens - the broad masses - and a leader: the chief rooster. Around him orbit the lesser roosters, the deputies and second-rankers. Some hens are the chief rooster's favourites; others are of no particular interest to him - though he will avail himself of any that happen to be conveniently at hand. A rooster worth his spurs feels responsible for his hens. He protects them from all manner of misfortune - prowling cats, for instance - and shows them where the tastiest grain and the fattest worms are to be found. Lazy hens he chivvies out of the henhouse and into the yard. In short, he wants his little chicken commonwealth to prosper.

The hens sit in their nests and cluck (I nearly said: on their smartphones). Their clucking often seems to go nowhere in particular. Yet it usually has its reasons: imaginary or genuine fears, excitement, indignation, or the wish to drive away a rival. They cluck with especial persistence and eloquence when they wish to inform the world that they are about to lay an egg - or that they have just laid one of uncommon magnificence.

From time to time, full-blown scandals erupt among the hens - when one of them, for instance, occupies a nesting place another had already chosen for herself. Or when two hens fall out over a rooster. Such scandals are noisy, prolonged, and wholly absorbing.

The roosters strut about and boast to one another of their beauty, their bravery, their heroism in general. They puff out their plumage, hoping to intimidate a rival by the mere appearance of size. Before a duel, two roosters stand beak to beak and stare each other down, searching for the first flicker of weakness. Then they fling themselves at one another, and the feathers fly. There are also particularly treacherous roosters who, after a battle that ends in a draw, will wait for days, choose their moment, ambush an unsuspecting opponent, and strike a blow that may prove dangerous or even fatal.

In consequence of such contests, the flock could in theory lose all its roosters - especially if there were not many to begin with. Either they have all killed one another, with the final victor dying proudly of his wounds, or some other calamity has carried off the last survivor - a fox, perhaps. When this happens, the duties are redistributed. The most determined hen, usually the largest as well, assumes the rooster's role. She drives her companions on, shows them where food is to be found, and may even mount another hen in a symbolic imitation of treading her.

Members of the male sex - especially in its military branch - have unconsciously (and in some cultures quite consciously) taken this proud feathered creature as their model. They dress in brightly coloured uniforms, put helmets with magnificent crests on their heads, strap spurs to their boots, and fight for the right to crow before ever greater numbers of hens and young cockerels - and to reserve the available feeding troughs for themselves alone.

Communication in the chicken commonwealth has its own peculiar laws. The entire community clucks, cackles, and crows - and almost no one listens to anyone else. Transmission dominates; reception is minimal. Consequently, the needs and wishes of one's neighbours generally remain unheard and misunderstood.

This is not to say that chickens never help one another. There are agreeable exceptions. If a hen is choking on a long blade of grass, she may count on a companion to pull it out of her beak.

The hen usually ignores what genuinely matters, yet cackles at length about the utterly trivial. Chickens will do things that are frankly life-threatening - swallowing shards of glass and screws, for example - without a moment's hesitation. They go where they have no business going - onto the road, say - and refuse precisely what would do them good. Nutritious but dull feed? That is not for them."

The professor merely grunted in reply, but found nothing of substance to object to. Nor, in truth, did he particularly wish to. His wife - like many representatives of the fair sex - was not easily persuaded to doubt the correctness of her own opinion.

* * *

After sitting with this idea for some time, the professor decided to examine the matter more closely.

He began with military history. If one looks at it long enough, and with the proper degree of irony, it does begin to resemble, rather suspiciously, one enormous international cockfight. Of course, no self-respecting commander ever told his soldiers: "Gentlemen, our objective is to look like a henhouse in a state of emergency." Officially, everything was explained otherwise. The intention was to appear taller, more visible, more frightening, more noble - and to allow one's own side to spot the commander from afar. Yet the result was often the same: grown men, armed to the teeth, solemnly placed crests, plumes, and feathers upon their heads - and marched off to demonstrate their superiority to the neighbours.

The ancient Greeks are especially convincing in this regard. The hoplite in his high-crested helmet is, of course, a formidable warrior, guardian of the polis, hero of red- and black-figure vase painting. But remove the pathos and what stands before us is an almost perfect fighting cock: chest thrust forward, helmet gleaming, crest swaying, spear at the ready. The Romans went further and gave this whole feathered business an administrative structure. A centurion with his helmet crest looked as though the cock's comb had received an official appointment, a military rank, and the right to command legions. The Latin word crista denoted both the comb of a cock and the crest of a helmet - suggesting that antiquity itself may have sensed how dangerously close military aesthetics had come to poultry breeding.

Other ancient peoples were no less inventive. The Samnites and other Italic warriors adorned their helmets with plumes and crests as though, before battle, they had not received orders but auditioned for the role of the most conspicuous rooster in the district. The Celts preferred a broader ornithological repertoire: their helmets bore wings and other theatrical borrowings from the world of birds. This was no longer a henhouse; it was a whole theatre of martial feather-display. The enemy of a Celtic warrior was meant to understand that before him stood not merely a man with a sword, but a man with a sword who might, for all anyone knew, take flight at any moment.

This 'airborne' line was later carried to magnificent excess by the Polish-Lithuanian winged hussars - those 'flying hussar squadrons'. They were not content with a modest crest upon the head; they fastened entire wings to themselves. This was the next evolutionary stage: from 'I look like a rooster' to 'I am a heavily armed apocalyptic peacock'. The practical rationale was easy enough to find: terrify the enemy, make a psychological impression, stand out on the battlefield. Yet from the outside it seems that military imagination had at some point reached the following conclusion: if a warrior with a sabre is frightening, a warrior with a sabre and feathers must be twice as frightening.

Special mention should be made of British and Scottish military headdresses, with their feathers, plumes, and hackles. Here the rooster motif becomes almost domestic: the feathers might well be genuine, and the overall silhouette often suggests less rational combat equipment than the ceremonial entrance of the chief cock into the farmyard.

The French, however, outdid everyone in the rooster department. They not only added the motif to their uniforms; they elevated the Gallic cock to the status of national symbol. The irony here is particularly refined: France thereby officially acknowledged the source of those aesthetic flourishes which other armies preferred to hide behind words such as 'honour', 'valour', and 'tradition'. Nor is it accidental that one of France's best-loved dishes is coq au vin - literally, 'cock in wine'.

In fairness, one should not claim that armies copied roosters literally. They were using a universal language of power display: look taller, broader, brighter, more conspicuous; project strength, status, and readiness for combat. But precisely for that reason the resemblance to the rooster is so striking. The rooster reads no treatises on military psychology, yet he knows the essentials: rise on your toes, beat your wings, raise your comb, ruffle your feathers, loudly announce your intentions - and perhaps your opponent will decide that the encounter is not worth the price. In this sense, the distance between the ancient battlefield and the henhouse was sometimes not very great. Some had spears, others beaks; but the methods of influencing the enemy were remarkably alike.

The military-rooster motif, driven to its extreme, also has its darker side. Poultry farms regularly carry out what the industry calls the 'culling' of male chicks - a harmless-sounding term which in practice means the mass killing of young roosters, a veritable cockerel slaughter. The owners of poultry farms simply do not know what to do with them. Roosters cannot lay eggs, and a saturated market can absorb only so much meat. So the young crowers go into the shredder.

If one thinks about it, human governments treat their young men in much the same way. They start unnecessary wars, fought with precision weapons of collective and, at times, mass destruction. They send masses of soldiers into them. In the end, the one objective reliably achieved becomes visible: the disposal of a 'surplus' of young men - in one's own country as well as in the enemy's. Then it suddenly emerges that the country is catastrophically short of workers and that women have no one left to marry. Tsars, kings, presidents, sultans, and khans come to their senses and demand that the 'weaker sex' reproduce more diligently. What they forget to specify is with whom. The relevant minister - for family, demography, or public health - is left to carry the blame. The rulers wag their fingers sternly: these idlers are failing to provide the necessary birth rate.

If the shortage concerns hens and eggs rather than men, the agricultural ministers are first in the firing line. They are thrown at the problem of increasing egg production. Fail - and you may find yourself sitting on the eggs.

* * *

As he continued to consider his wife's theory, the professor found himself thinking of Elias Canetti - the Nobel laureate who devoted his life to the study of how the crowd devours the individual, how power deforms the human being, and how the mass lives by laws of its own. Canetti's Crowds and Power is one of the strangest and grandest monuments of the twentieth century: anthropology, poem, and diagnosis all at once.

The professor assumed that Canetti must surely have written something about chickens. He simply could not have passed them by. Alas, Crowds and Power contains no direct mention of chickens. Canetti preferred more exotic creatures. When illustrating the nature of power, he was particularly drawn to bandicoots - small Australian marsupials that resemble rats but are in fact related to kangaroos, wombats, and bilbies, and are not rodents at all.

Canetti mentions bandicoots in connection with the rituals of the Aranda. The Aboriginal people supposedly believed that a properly performed ceremony would multiply bandicoots upon the earth. The mechanism is plain: the chief promises abundance; the crowd believes and obeys. A henhouse could have illustrated the same idea perfectly well - but Canetti appears to have considered the bandicoot worthier material.

Apply Canetti's conceptual machinery to chicken society, however, and the picture that emerges is no less vivid. The 'survivor' - the one who stands above a heap of the defeated and experiences a rush of power - is, for Canetti, the primal figure of authority. That is precisely the chief rooster after victory: he stands there, feathers raised, emits his cry of triumph, and experiences what Canetti would have called the moment of power in its purest form. And the hens huddling together at the sight of a hawk are the 'besieged crowd', which Canetti described as the earliest form of human solidarity: people unite not out of love for one another, but out of shared fear. Thus: Canetti did not write about chickens - but the chickens, especially the roosters, appear to have read Canetti.

* * *

The professor discovered that the chicken theme had penetrated deep into world literature. Many writers had found his wife's idea - the resemblance between chicken society and human society - not in the least far-fetched.

There are at least several hundred more or less well-known works of world literature devoted specifically to chickens, and many more in which chickens are mentioned in passing. For all its apparent frivolity, the subject proves inexhaustible: pull at one feather, and you draw out an entire henhouse of meanings.

Popular wisdom maintains that chickens are stupid. Folklore and literature, almost unanimously, beg to differ.

* * *

The first storyteller in the European fable and fairy-tale tradition to take chickens seriously was, in all likelihood, the ancient Greek Aesop - a man who, according to tradition, had himself been a slave and therefore knew from experience how the weak survive among the strong.

In his fable 'The Cat and the Hens', Aesop tells how a cat heard that the hens in the farmyard were unwell. She dressed as a doctor, took her medical instruments (which already existed in ancient Greece), presented herself at the henhouse, and asked from the doorway how the hens were feeling. 'Splendidly!' the hens replied - 'but only when you are nowhere near.' The diagnosis had been made, and the doctor had to depart without a patient.

No less polished is another of Aesop's stories: that of the rooster, the dog, and the fox. The rooster flew up into a tree and settled among the branches; the dog slept in the hollow trunk below. At dawn, the rooster crowed, as was his custom. The fox heard him, appeared at once, and invited him to come down so that they might sing together. But the rooster was no fool. 'Come closer,' he said, 'and call to the watchman down there by the trunk. Ask him to knock on the wood.' The fox approached - and was promptly torn apart by the dog.

Aesop's moral is constant: wit is worth more than strength, caution more than courage, and the most persuasive flattery is that which comes when one is hungry. In his fables, hens and roosters embody the common sense of the little man who knows how to survive in a world of large predators.

It is curious that Aesop seems to have felt something like professional respect for chickens. After all, he too spent his life speaking truth through other mouths - rather like a hen who will never tell you outright that the cat is dangerous, but will hint at it so eloquently that only the striped predator herself fails to understand.

* * *

In the Middle Ages, the chicken theme recurred in oral tradition with admirable regularity. One of the most popular figures in French and pan-European folklore is Reynard the Fox - the trickster who outwits barons, bishops, and the king himself. The Roman de Renart took shape in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and became one of the earliest examples of what we now call satire.

So long as Reynard deceives the powerful, he gets away with it. But the moment he turns his cunning against the simple-hearted rooster Chantecler, the fox himself gets into trouble. Chantecler, whom Reynard has caught by trickery (he asked him to demonstrate how he crows with his eyes closed), immediately turns the same tactic back on him: he persuades the fox to shout triumphantly at his pursuers - and wrenches himself free the instant the fox opens his mouth.

The story returns in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - in 'The Nun's Priest's Tale', where the rooster Chanticleer and his beloved hen Pertelote conduct a learned, courtly debate on the nature of prophetic dreams. The rooster has dreamed of a fox and wishes to be on his guard; Pertelote explains that dreams are merely indigestion and advises a laxative. Chanticleer, a deft polemicist, cites Cicero and Macrobius in reply - and then falls for the fox's flattery all the same. Chaucer thus wrote a comedy about the uselessness of learning in the presence of vanity, and dressed it in chicken feathers.

This is the defining feature of medieval chicken literature: beneath the feathers lurk entirely recognisable human weaknesses. Chanticleer is not merely a rooster. He is any one of us at the moment someone tells us how beautifully we sing.

* * *

In the modern period, the theme of chicken wit and chicken cunning was taken up by the great fabulists - Jean de La Fontaine and Ivan Krylov.

La Fontaine, a French aristocrat with a peasant soul, was convinced that animals understand the world better than human beings do; they merely lack the opportunity to write memoirs about it. In his Fables, hens embody the eternal contradiction between appearance and reality. He was especially fond of the tale of the bird that laid the golden eggs - in his version, the hen. In La Fontaine, it sounds less like a moral lesson than a melancholy diagnosis of human greed, which contrives to destroy the very thing that feeds it.

Krylov, La Fontaine's heir adjusted for the Russian climate and Russian reality, pushed the thought to its logical limit in 'The Miser and the Hen' - with that darkly Russian mockery at which he was so naturally gifted. His characters are not merely foolish; they are foolish with pomp and dignity, and entirely unaware of it, which makes their foolishness all the more incurable.

It is worth noting that both La Fontaine and Krylov chose chickens not only for the sake of the moral but for the precision of the portrait. The hen in their fables is a thoroughly realistic creature: not an abstraction, but almost a resident of the neighbouring yard. That is precisely what makes the fabulists' blows against human vices land so accurately.

* * *

Persian folk tales, too, contain the story of a rooster who outwits a fox - very much in the spirit of Aesop, but with an oriental colouring. An old rooster saves himself by flying up into a tree. The fox assures him that the Shah has decreed that animals are henceforth to live in peace and that the strong are no longer to oppress the weak; the rooster may therefore come down without fear and take a walk with him. The rooster then pretends to see a pack of animals approaching in the distance and suggests they may be sheepdogs. The fox panics and prepares to flee. The rooster asks: if the Shah's decree is really in force, why is he afraid? The fox replies that the sheepdogs were probably outside the city and have not heard the decree - and takes to his heels.

In the Tatar tale 'The Shah Rooster', another quality appears - not cleverness, but empty pomposity. The rooster struts about the yard, gives himself airs, leaps onto the fence, and suddenly proclaims himself Shah, Padishah, Khan, and Sultan all at once. The hens admire him and praise him in chorus as the bravest, handsomest, and mightiest of all. Inflated with vanity, he demands ever more hymns to his 'throne' and his 'crown' - and at that very moment the cook creeps up, seizes him, slaughters him, plucks him, and turns him into soup.

* * *

Having gathered together all that he had seen and read, the professor identified several stable chicken motifs that migrate from one culture to another with extraordinary persistence.

The first, and perhaps the most widespread: 'One fool is outwitted by another fool whom everyone took for an even greater fool.' The clever one - the fox, the cat, the malicious neighbour - underestimates the hen or rooster, and in the end is left looking foolish. The attraction of the motif lies in the hope it offers to all who have ever been underestimated: that is, to the majority of the living.

The second: 'Elsewhere may be pleasant, but home is best.' The hen or rooster sets off into the wide world, encounters it in all its grandeur, and returns to the familiar feeding trough with the firm conviction that happiness is to be found there. Philosophically questionable, certainly - but extremely practical when the feeding trough is a good one.

The third: 'The pearl in the dung.' A hen finds a precious stone and leaves it where it lies, preferring a worm or a grain of corn. The motif can be read in at least two ways: either the hen is an exceptionally wise creature who knows what she truly needs, or she is a hopeless materialist, unable to rise above the prose of everyday life. Literature, as a rule, sympathises with the hen.

The fourth: 'The golden cockerel and the price of free cheese.' Someone receives a magical helper - a cockerel, a hen, an egg - together with a condition. Break the condition, and catastrophe follows. Alexander Pushkin developed this motif in his 'Tale of the Golden Cockerel' with a political sharpness that kept the censors uneasy for a long time. The moral is timeless: free cheese exists only in the mousetrap, and a magic cockerel only in a fairy tale.

The fifth: 'Greed devours itself.' Aesop formulated it first: a widow overfeeds her hen in the hope of getting two eggs instead of one; the hen grows fat and stops laying altogether. In later versions, the owner kills the hen to obtain all the golden eggs at once - and is left with neither eggs nor hen. The story repeats itself in the world economy with alarming regularity; yet each new generation of statesmen and entrepreneurs seems to discover Aesop a little too late.

The sixth: 'He who does not work shall not eat.' The industrious hen sows, reaps, grinds the grain, and bakes the bread. At each stage she asks her neighbours for help; everyone is busy. When the bread is ready, everyone suddenly appears. The hen now gives no one anything. The motif may be read both as an apology for justice and as consolation for all those who always end up doing everything themselves.

The seventh: 'Optimism as a survival strategy.' Faced with danger, hens draw together, strengthen one another, and do not lose their heads - literally. This group of motifs gained considerable popularity after the release of Chicken Run (2000), in which hens organise a collective escape from a poultry farm with such ingenuity and self-sacrifice that many a partisan detachment might envy them.

The eighth: 'Spiritual transformation.' Here we enter the territory of Viktor Pelevin - a writer who seems to have been born specifically to discover metaphysics in places where others see only chicken droppings.

* * *

In the novella 'Hermit and Six-Toes', Pelevin describes two broiler chicks on a poultry farm - the Hermit and Six-Toes - who, instead of pecking feed in dull obedience, have taken up philosophy. They discuss the nature of reality, the meaning of existence, and the possibility of escape. In this story, the poultry farm is a metaphor for authoritarian society, where everything is arranged so that the inhabitants have neither the time nor the strength to think about anything except food. Two of them nevertheless think - and that makes them dangerous. The ending is among the most piercing moments in recent Russian literature: the chicks fly away. Not metaphorically. Literally.

In his chicken text, Pelevin pushes the parallel between the two societies - the avian and the human - to a grotesque, and therefore especially convincing, extreme. If chickens are us, then the poultry farm is... Well, each reader may finish the sentence for himself.

* * *

When the professor's wife began keeping chickens, it emerged that domestic chicken-keeping - or rather chicken-fancying, where the point is not eggs or white meat for soup but the sheer pleasure of dealing with hens - is a widespread pursuit. Especially large numbers of chicken enthusiasts live on the edges of cities and in the countryside, where birds can still be kept on real ground and the neighbours still remember that chickens existed before supermarkets.

Chicken enthusiasts are a colourful and ardent community. One thing unites them: they have long since abandoned the utilitarian view of the bird and now regard it rather as a collector regards a rare stamp, or a music lover a valuable vinyl record. That is to say, with a love bordering on obsession.

* * *

The first thing a newcomer notices on entering the world of chicken enthusiasts is the coops. Not the dreary wooden sheds that have stood in vegetable gardens since time immemorial. These are true architectural jewels.

A modern designer chicken coop may be built in the style of an Alpine chalet, with carved window frames and a little tiled roof. Or in the style of Japanese minimalism, with sliding panels and a gravel garden by the entrance. Or in the Victorian manner, with turrets, a weather vane in the shape of a rooster, and a glazed veranda where the hens can contemplate the garden in bad weather without getting their feet wet.

Occasionally one encounters truly avant-garde solutions. There are coops with climate control: ventilation in summer, underfloor heating in winter. Some - we are speaking not of commercial poultry farms but of amateur residences - have heated automatic drinkers, lighting that imitates the natural day (so that the hens lay in the correct rhythm), CCTV cameras (so the owners can follow the lives of their favourites on a smartphone), and even hen-recognition systems, allowing the automatic door to know whom to admit for the night and whom to leave outside.

There are coops in which classical music is played. Among chicken enthusiasts, the belief circulates that Mozart or Vivaldi has a favourable effect on laying performance - although the scientific evidence is contradictory and the hens themselves prefer not to comment.

It is said that one American chicken fancier built his favourites a three-storey 'chicken palace' of some twenty square metres, with separate apartments for each breed, a library (shelves of dummy books for atmosphere), and a small sign on the door reading: 'Welcome to Bedlam.' At least he did not lie about the name - though the story itself invites a certain scepticism.

* * *

For some chicken enthusiasts, even the walk from the house to the coop is too long a separation from their beloved charges. Such people simply let the chickens into the house. Not temporarily, but permanently, as others keep a cat or a dog. The hens promenade through the sitting room, leap onto the sofa, peck the remains of breakfast from the kitchen table, and display a character their owners prefer to describe as 'difficult, but interesting'.

Chicken lovers of this category behave as though chickens did not excrete. More precisely, somewhere at the edge of consciousness they admit that hens leave calling cards behind them - but they have devised whole systems for removing them: special chicken nappies (yes, they exist, and yes, they are sold online), regular cleaning, special floor coverings. Some householders cover white tablecloths with oilcloth and regard this as a reasonable compromise between aesthetics and reality.

House hens are taught tricks: to come when called by name, to jump onto a hand, to peck particular objects on command. One chicken enthusiast from Colorado taught his eleven hens to play a small xylophone - that is, to strike the keys in a more or less predictable order. The video went viral and continues to gather views. Music critics have abstained from comment.

Another popular chicken presence on social media is Fresh Eggs Daily by Lisa Steele, a former Wall Street accountant who describes herself as a fifth-generation chicken keeper. Her following is approaching seven figures worldwide.

* * *

Chicken enthusiasts are most easily distinguished by the breeds they keep. It is rather like dividing music lovers by genre: there are jazz snobs, metalheads, Baroque purists - and all regard the others with friendly incomprehension.

Leghorns are birds for pragmatists. White, prolific, efficient. Loved by those who value the result more than the process.

Lohmann Browns are the workhorses of poultry keeping. Brown, reliable, abundantly productive. Popular with those who prefer to get straight to the point.

Wyandottes are for aesthetes. Lush plumage, soft contours, fanciful rounded tails. The laced feathering of some birds makes them look like ladies in ball gowns. Wyandottes are usually kept by people with artistic taste and the patience of angels.

Croatian birds, Augsburgers, La Fleche - comparatively rare breeds for true connoisseurs. To keep them is to preserve a gene pool. The owners of such breeds regard themselves as custodians of cultural heritage - and, broadly speaking, they are not even wrong.

Ameraucanas are for lovers of life's colourful side. They lay mostly blue eggs, but with sufficient effort can produce a whole palette - from pale and dark blue through green and olive to pink and brown. Ameraucanas exist so that human beings may finally understand that life is full of surprises, and not all of them are bad.

Cochins are enormous, shaggy down to their feet, and imperturbable. They are in no hurry. In no hurry whatsoever. They embody Zen.

The Chinese Silkie is a breed for those who have long suspected that the world is not quite what it seems. Its feathers lack the tiny hooks that hold normal plumage together, so they splay apart and feel to the touch like silk or rabbit fur but nothing like a chicken. Its skin is black or bluish-black, its bones the same, its flesh dark grey and yet it is considered a bird of healing virtue in Chinese medicine and a delicacy in Chinese cooking. The portrait is completed by a crest on its head, through which the bird perpetually views the world as through its own private hairdo. Silkies are kept by people for whom an ordinary chicken is not enough they need a chicken that calls into question the very concept of a chicken.

Bantams - dwarf chickens - are perhaps best suited to city flats and the small gardens of terraced houses. Miniature chickens for miniature quarters. The entire chicken cosmos in small format: extraordinary variety of plumage, but the same passions, the same hierarchies, the same scandals - only en miniature.

* * *

Chicken enthusiasts regularly hold shows at which they parade their finest birds. These events - a kind of chicken haute couture - are a mixture of beauty pageant, scientific conference, and village fair, all at once and without the slightest contradiction.

The bird is judged against the breed standard - a document which states, with bureaucratic precision, what the ideal specimen of that breed should look like: the shape of the comb, the colour of the earlobes (yes, chickens have earlobes, and their colour is a matter of fundamental importance), the angle of the tail, the structure of the plumage, the proportions of the body. Stern judges move among the cages with the expression of experts appraising Stradivarius violins.

The winners receive ribbons and cups. The owners receive satisfaction - and the right to mention their champions in conversation in roughly the same tone in which other people mention children who have graduated with honours.

The largest shows are held annually: in Britain, the National Poultry Show; in the United States, the APA National Meet, where several thousand birds are judged each year. This is no longer a hobby. It is a way of life.

The internet has, of course, expanded this community to a planetary scale. Forums, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts with thousands of followers, all devoted to individual hens with names and biographies. Among the most resonant names in the Instagram chicken world is Princess Leya - or, in the form more appropriate to a laying hen, Princess Layer. As you will have guessed, she is named after Princess Leia Organa from Star Wars. Perhaps that extravagant name accounts for a generous share of her celebrity.

Another hen, simply named Sammy (@sammichicken), has gathered more than 111,000 followers on Instagram - hardly an unheard-of story in the world of chicken social media, where the hashtag #ChickensOfInstagram gathers millions of posts. The phenomenon has even acquired its own name: 'henfluencers'. The trouble is that, owing to natural attrition, chickens cannot henfluence for very long. So it was with Sammi. When she departed for the great chicken beyond in June 2023, she was succeeded first by Gypsi and then by Dusti, who appears to be henfluencing to this day under the same brand and without changing a feather.

* * *

The largest community of chicken enthusiasts on the internet - the forum BackYardChickens.com - has more than 400,000 registered members. There they discuss diseases, feed, coop construction, chicken psychology, and the meaning of chicken-keeping itself. There is a thread called 'Show Me Your Chickens' which has been running for many years and contains hundreds of thousands of posts. It may well be the longest discussion thread in internet history devoted to a single subject.

In Russia and the former Soviet states, similar communities gather on forums such as 'Khozyaystvo' and in VKontakte groups, where chicken keepers exchange feed recipes and complain, with equal passion, about neighbours who fail to appreciate the beauty of a cockerel's crow at five in the morning.

There are also philosophically inclined chicken enthusiasts who see something greater in chicken-keeping than a hobby. They speak of 'returning to the roots', of the 'rhythm of nature', of how watching hens teaches patience, equanimity, and the ability to rejoice in small things. This may sound somewhat solemn - but when you see a person crouching for half an hour to watch his Wyandotte proceed with measured dignity across the yard, you begin to suspect that he knows something you do not.

* * *

Unfortunately, alongside chicken enthusiasm there also exists chicken phobia - a widespread phenomenon, though a less photogenic one. The best-known variety is perhaps rooster phobia, common among people connected with prisons, or at least among those who orient themselves by the unwritten codes of prison culture.

In prison subculture, the word 'rooster' (in Russian, 'petukh') does not mean the cheerful bird that wakes the village at dawn. It denotes a prisoner of the lowest caste - a man who, for one reason or another (usually a very specific one), has irrevocably lost standing in the criminal community. He may have been humiliated before imprisonment; he may have been subjected to sexual violence inside; or he may be serving a sentence for crimes regarded as shameful even in criminal circles.

The vocabulary used to designate members of the lowest prison castes is surprisingly rich - language, as is well known, develops with particular vigour wherever there is a need to classify social distinctions with precision. This is a whole taxonomy of social humiliation, elaborated with a care that many a systematic biologist might envy.

The status of 'roosters' within the prison hierarchy is paradoxical - which should surprise no one, since paradox is the very foundation of prison ethics. On the one hand, one must not touch 'roosters', share food with them, or do any business with them; otherwise one risks becoming 'tainted', contracting their low status as if it were a disease. On the other hand, sexual relations with them in the active role are not considered shameful. The internal logic of this system remains a subject of reflection and debate among researchers and the more intellectually alert criminal authorities alike.

The origin of the term is obscure, as is most of what arises inside closed communities. One plausible version connects the 'rooster' not so much with the bird itself as with the verb 'to sing': in prison slang, this did not mean performing romances, but informing. Anyone who began 'to sing' (in Russian, 'pet') - that is, to talk to the authorities - quickly slid to the very bottom of the criminal hierarchy. Another version links the term to older dialect forms current in prisons of an earlier period. The terminology is thought to have hardened in the Soviet camps of the 1930s and 1940s, when the conditions of confinement became so brutal that the social structure inside began reproducing the structure outside with redoubled intensity.

Researchers who study this subject generally agree that no certain conclusions can be drawn: there are too few written sources and too much oral transmission. Which, in its way, is logical. Written sources from places where the principal medium of communication is knocking through a brick wall are, as one might expect, not abundant.

* * *

After thinking over his findings, the professor perceived one further important aspect. In all probability, chickens inherited their social relations from their distant ancestors - the dinosaurs.

The connection is not metaphorical but literal. Modern science leaves little room for doubt: birds are dinosaurs that survived the catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous. More precisely, they are descended from theropods - bipedal predators that included the famous Tyrannosaurus rex. The chicken is therefore a distant relative of a creature that terrified the entire Mesozoic world. To keep this in mind over one's next chicken cutlet is to lend lunch a quite special dimension.

The dinosaurs, with their astonishing variety of forms and sizes - from sparrow to six-storey house - were, in all probability, social beings. Palaeontologists find evidence of herd behaviour, communal egg-brooding, and complex courtship rituals. Hierarchies and mating displays seem to have existed among them. How else are we to explain the fact that some males carried crests, ridges, and vivid colouring clearly intended not for hunting but for attracting the opposite sex?

There is little reason to suppose that the social organisation of dinosaur communities was much more sophisticated than that of chicken communities. The Tyrannosaurus was, of course, considerably more frightening than any chief rooster - but, judged by the ratio of brain to body, scarcely much wiser. The basic principles of the chicken flock - hierarchy, display, competition for resources, defence of territory - are very likely the principles by which dinosaurs lived as well. Evolution had tested them for at least several hundred million years.

Small wonder, then, that we find the same principles at the foundation of human society. Homo sapiens has lived on Earth for roughly three hundred thousand years. If one follows the broader human ancestral line, the count passes two million. Either way, by the measure of Earth's history, this is no time at all: a moment, no more. Dinosaurs ruled the planet for many tens of millions of years, and in that time had ample opportunity to polish their social patterns to perfection.

Perhaps this is precisely why chicken enthusiasts are instinctively drawn to chickens. Not out of sentimentality, and not out of ecological consciousness, but because in the company of a chicken - a creature whose genes carry the memory of the Mesozoic - the human being feels something like reassurance. All this has happened before. Hierarchies, scandals, cackling over trifles, rare flickers of mutual aid: these are not diseases of civilisation. They are a programme that has been running for hundreds of millions of years.

Back to basics, as the English say. Or, more freely translated: the henhouse is older than the open-plan office.

* * *

By Way of an Afterword

The professor, who had at first rejected his wife's idea, ultimately found nothing essential to set against it. In the end, he surrendered. He was a scientist, and he understood that the most elegant theories are those which explain much by means of little. His wife's theory explained the history of humanity by means of a single henhouse. One must admit, that is economical.

His wife, meanwhile, had fed the hens, closed the henhouse, and gone indoors to prepare dinner. The hens clucked a little longer from force of habit - and then fell silent. At least from the outside, that is how it appeared.

What they said to one another inside, the professor never discovered. But he suspected that it was most likely the same things people say to one another.

* * *

Notes

(1) After: Aesop's Fables, series 'Literary Monuments'. Moscow: Nauka, 1968. Fable numbers from the main collection.

(2) Canetti E. Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart. London: Gollancz, 1962.

(3) Pelevin V. 'The Hermit and Six-Toes' // Pelevin V. The Blue Lantern. Moscow: Text, 1991.

(4) Chaucer G. The Canterbury Tales. The Nun's Priest's Tale.

(5) BackYardChickens.com - the world's largest international forum for amateur poultry keepers. Founded 2004.