How A Headless Chicken Lived for 18 months

Mike, the headless chicken survived for 18 months and became famous, and scientists believe it was all because of a lucky blow that prevented its sudden demise. 

Seventy years ago, farmer Lloyd Olsen was decapitating chickens on his family farm in Fruita, Colorado to be sold to the market when one of 40 to 50 beheaded chickens picked themselves up and ran across the yard. It was very much alive.

Olsen caught the chicken, which he eventually named Mike in an apple box on the porch. The next morning, Olsen and his wife were surprised to find that the decapitated chicken was still alive.

He took the headless chicken, threw it in the wagon, and started wagering people that he had a live chicken sans the head.

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Soon after, the word spread around Fruita about the unusual chicken. A local paper interviewed Olsen. Two weeks later, a sideshow promoter called Hope Wade traveled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah, and made a simple proposition to the Olsens: take the chicken to a sideshow circuit to make money. The couple agreed.

They first visited Salt Lake City and the University of Utah, where researchers put the chicken in a battery of tests. By then, Hope Wade had branded it as Mike, the Headless Chicken.

The Olsens couple had been touring around the US to showcase the headless chicken.

 Mike, the headless chicken died in Pheonix, Arizona.

Mike was fed with liquid food and water that the Olsens dropped directly to the esophagus. The couple feeds the chicken with a dropper and cleared mucus from its throat using a syringe.

On the night that Mike died, the bird was choking. When they looked for the syringe to clear his throat, they realized that they left the syringe in the sideshow. Mike suffocated before they were able to find an alternative to the syringe.

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How was living without the head possible?

(Photo : Pixabay)
A headless chicken survived for 18 months and became famous, and scientists believe it was all because of a lucky blow that prevented its sudden demise.

While beheading may disconnect the brain from the rest of the body, the spinal cord circuits have residual oxygen. Without the brain, neurons can still become active, and the legs can still start moving. Normally, the chicken is lying down when such events happen but in some rare cases, neurons trigger a motor program of running, and it may run for 15 minutes or so but not for 18 days.  

The Olsen's blow was indeed a lucky strike, scientists deem. 

 A chicken's brain is so small and is located in the front of the head of a chicken. It is found mainly at the back of the skull, just behind the eyes.

According to reports, Olsen's hatchet blow removed Mike's beak, face, eyes, and ears but up to 80 percent of the brain's mass, including the part of the brain that controls the chicken's body, heart rate, breathing, hunger, and digestion remained unharmed. Dr. Tom Smulders, a chicken expert at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle University suggests that Mike survived the blow because part or all of the brains were still attached to his body.

Smulders was surprised that Mike did not bleed to death. The cut was just in the right place and at the right time that a timely blood clot prevented Mike, the chicken without the head from bleeding to death.

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