It is no longer a mystery why chickens can run around for a few seconds after losing their heads. But why did the male chicken ‘Miracle Mike’ last for 18 months?
Chickens manage to keep moving after their heads have been chopped off thanks to the motor nerves that tell the muscles to contract. The signals for those motor nerves do not come from the brain, but from the nerve center in the spine.
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Chickens manage to keep moving after their heads have been chopped off thanks to the motor nerves that tell the muscles to contract. The signals for those motor nerves do not come from the brain, but from the nerve center in the spine. Actually, this also occurs in humans: if you touch a hot surface with your hand, for example, the sensory nerve will not travel all the way to the brain, but the spinal cord will command the motor nerve to get your hand away as soon as possible. to pull. We call this a reflex. Since the nerve endings in the chicken’s neck are triggered, the muscles are thus given the pre-programmed message to perform frequently used movements, such as swimming or walking. It seems as if the chicken is flapping its wings and running around, even though the animal is already dead. This usually takes a minute until the nerves and muscles are no longer receiving oxygen, but a minute can sometimes turn into months. After a massacre slaughtered at a chicken farm in the American state of Colorado, a certain rooster Mike continued to pluck without a head for 18 months in 1945. The farmer who wanted to slaughter him, Lloyd Olsen, had aimed too high. The male chicken’s head had been chopped off just above its eyes, removing only the bird’s forebrain. This can sometimes happen to birds because of their large eye sockets they have little space in the skull for their brains. Therefore, a piece of the brain has to resort to the top of the neck. When the cerebellum or cerebellum is still intact, the chicken will therefore still be able to breathe, have a heartbeat and perform basic motor functions. Mike was lucky. Normally he had bled to death after the failed slaughter, but a blood clot prevented it. The rooster was kept alive by dripping milk and water into its throat (or what was left of it) and pushing small kernels of corn into it. Farmer Olsen then toured the Southwestern United States to show his rarity to the people for a fee. It gave him a nice penny. In the end, the ‘chicken with the golden eggs’ died because farmer Olsen had forgotten the syringe with which he regularly removed the mucus from the chicken’s throat. Nevertheless, the animal lived longer than many of its conspecifics with its head. A lurid consequence of all history was that many chicken farmers later hoped to earn a penny on their chickens and try the trick on their own animals, resulting in significant chicken mortality. Chickens aren’t the only animals that can survive without a head. Flies, snakes, octopuses, grasshoppers, cockroaches and turtles also have this curious feature.
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