The Tragic True Tale of Mike the Headless Chicken

When I was a kid, around ten years old, my brother and I spent two weeks in the summer with our grandma. Grandma and Grandpa lived on a farm. One day, Grandma asked us what we wanted for dinner.

You need to know at this point that my Grandma made THE best fried chicken in the world. Colonel Sanders would've changed his secret recipe if he'd ever had my Grandma's fried chicken. So, obviously, we asked for fried chicken.

"Fine," this dear, saintly old woman said. "Go out in the yard and catch that speckled hen."

Forty-five minutes later, we bring the chicken to Grandma. This sweet little lady who didn't weigh more than 90 pounds took the chicken...and, I promise this is true...swung it around by it's head and then snapped it's neck like Indiana Jones cracking his whip. The body comes detached from the head and flies into the yard ... where it then gets ON IT'S FEET and starts running around like a ... a ... well, a chicken with it's head cut off.

If you don't believe me, here is a video of a chicken doing exactly that. WARNING: this video shows a chicken with it's head cut off. Don't click on it if you don't want to see that.

This brings us to Mike the Headless Chicken. Mike wasn't always a headless chicken. For most of his life he was a headFUL chicken. In 1945, Mike was chosen to be dinner. Basically the farmer missed by a fraction of an inch. Mike's head came off but his jugular wasn't cut and most of his brain stem remained intact. Enough chicken brain remained, in fact that Mike didn't die right away. And by "right away" I mean "18 goddamned months"!

And, now, here's TV's Dean Cain to tell you more.

Yep, Mike lived for 18 month without the benefit of head and only died when his owners forgot to clean off the wound where his head SHOULD have been. The wound scabbed over and Mike suffocated.

That is a bummer. The only way to bounce back from a story like that is to pay tribute to Mike through the most sympathetic of mediums: Punk Rock.