A Chicken Tale

True story.

Yesterday I witnessed a chicken doing chicken things at the side of the road. Then it went to the edge of the sidewalk, looked both ways before darting across the road, head forward, legs pumping like the modern day velociraptor that it is. When it reached the other side, it stopped running and continued to do chicken things on the other sidewalk.

It occurred to me that the chicken had somehow learnt that there’s danger to wandering aimlessly in the road. That demonstrated that the chicken had a brain capacity that I did not attribute to chickens. But why did I think that chickens were incapable of this level of intellect? The answer is: my exposure to periodic chicken anecdotes and cursory interaction with them had led me to probably unfairly attribute traits to the entire species.

So have I been profiling chickens? Perhaps.

So I began to think of other areas of my life that I may have been profiling. Have I been using anecdotes and cursory interactions with categories of humans to unfairly attribute characteristics? Perhaps.

I will try to be better.

I am impressed that I got to the end of this discourse without ever wondering why did the chicken cross the…

Crap!