Meet Mike, the headless chicken and an African magic goat: Mankind has not evolved all that much over the years
(Some stories do not change…)
Last week I read an amazing story about Mike, the headless chicken. Mike’s owner decapitated the hapless egg factory in 1945, after which the chicken lived on for another eighteen months - earning its murderous owner a cool $4,500 per month on the sideshow circuit. Something that wouldn’t be considered chicken feed by most folks now but was a true fortune in the mid forties.
Anyway, it was a cute story and probably worth a column of its own but I was reminded of Mike when I read the following newspaper article - which involves a stolen car, a goat and the dumbest creature ever dreamt up by any optimistic God or explained by some enterprising Darwin:
“Police in Nigeria are holding a goat accused of attempting to steal a car. The black and white animal was turned in to police by a vigilante group, which claimed it was an armed car thief who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.
“The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car,” Tunde Mohammed, a spokesman for Kwara state police, told Reuters. “They pursued them. However, one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,” he said. While Mr Mohammed said he could not confirm whether a man had, in fact, turned into a goat, he did admit that the animal was in police custody.”
You have to say that when it comes to behaving like a headless chicken, poor Mike is seriously out of his depth when us humans enter the race.
Mike lasted for just a measly eighteen months. Humankind has been going at it for a cool 276.000 years (or 6000 years, if you care to believe a very weird subcategory of headless chickens.)
Nothing much has changed since the first cave-painting human being lost his first paint brush. Then, no doubt, mister caveman blamed his loss on the wicked sabre-toothed tiger next door or a cleptomanic woolly mammoth.
Since then, we have involved somewhat, inventing the wheel and traffic lights and windshield wipers en route, - to the point that we can now blame goats for the theft of our vehicles.
Plus ça change - not.
(Meet Mike, humankind’s totem animal)
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May 22nd, 2009 at 10:34
In searching for related sites, there’s seems to be a lot of similar content. However, you put it in plain, easy-to-understand English. Thank you.
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:59
My pleasure,
J.