Chicken

We Call Them Cowards

Over a morning coffee, in a meandering reverie, I was thinking about the past. About time. Which somehow led me to Back to the Future. Particularly the second film. The scene where Marty is called ‘chicken’ by Biff.

It got me thinking about both the slur and the animal, and their place in our zeitgeist.

We call someone a chicken to belittle them when they flinch. When they hesitate. When they don’t run into the fire. When we consider them a coward.

Calling someone a chicken in this way dates back to American slang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It drew on the association of chickens with skittishness and flightiness. Farmyard birds startle easily, flap wildly, and scatter at sudden movement, so the metaphor stuck. By the 1920s and 30s, ‘chicken’ was firmly embedded in popular culture, and we still use it today.

It’s a strange insult. Because those who use it have probably never really considered the chicken.

Chickens are the most farmed land animal in the world. Their eggs show up on our plates, their flesh miraculously appears in our dinners. They are, to a large extent, a modern commodity. But they’re more than that. They are a living animal. A creature of the universe.

I’ve kept chickens. I’ve also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them, but that’s another story.

The modern chicken is a direct descendant of the avian dinosaurs. An heir to creatures that roamed the planet for more than 160 million years. The backyard chook scratching in the dirt is biologically akin to those apex predators.

The lineage runs straight from Jurassic Park. Their anatomy, behaviour, and the way they tilt their heads and fix you with that side-eye. If you shrink a Tyrannosaurus, give it feathers and a coop, you don’t get a coward. You get a chicken.

And chickens are not gentle.

Anyone who has spent time with them knows this. They peck the weak. They draw blood. They establish dominance hierarchies through violence. The phrase pecking order exists for a reason.

Chickens might be small, but they are not timid. They are survivors shaped by millions of years of predation, scarcity and ruthless selection.

So why do we use them as shorthand for fear?

Maybe because we misunderstand them. And in doing so, maybe we misunderstand ourselves.

The Product of Devastation

I’m reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. In it, the teacher makes the point that we mistakenly think the world is here for us. As if we are the refined endpoint of evolution. Civilised. Rational. Removed from the brutality of our origins.

But the truth is less flattering.

We are only here because of catastrophe. A catastrophe that meant other species did not survive.

The asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago did not just wipe out the dinosaurs. It detonated opportunity. In the ash-dark aftermath, mammals crept into ecological spaces long closed to them. Our lineage expanded because something else burned.

And this was only the latest in a long line of extinction events. Of calamity. Before that, oxygen itself poisoned the planet in what we now call the Great Oxidation Event. Entire biospheres collapsed so new ones could emerge. Before that, the Earth was a molten battlefield of impacts and tectonic violence. Before that, stars exploded to seed space with the elements that now make up your bones.

It’s almost cliché to say we are walking supernova debris.

But we rarely consider that we are post-extinction opportunists. That we are, in a very real sense, the descendants of disaster.

And not just in our blood and bones. Our social systems have been forged in upheaval. The Black Death destabilised feudal Europe and reshaped labour. The Second World War tore continents apart and birthed institutions that still frame global cooperation. The COVID pandemic exposed brittle supply chains and structural inequality, and forced change that had long been resisted.

Catastrophe does not sit outside us.

It forms us. It is us.

The Dinosaur in the Coop

If chickens are dinosaurs, and misunderstood in our modernity, then perhaps we are misunderstood animals too.

We talk about human nature as though it is inherently kind or inherently evil. A black or white analogy, depending on which argument we are trying to win. But human nature is shaped by scarcity, threat, competition, collaboration and survival.

Like dinosaurs, and chickens, our existence is shaped by the ambivalence of nature. Of natural selection.

The result is that we are capable of remarkable compassion. And extraordinary brutality.

Both capacities were selected for. They have persisted over millions of years and are foundational to the story of our success as a species.

We don’t like to recognise that in times of threat, tribalism helped communities survive. Suspicion of outsiders had adaptive value. Pre-emptive aggression protected resources. Hierarchies organised effort and surplus.

None of this is morally pure. Nor should it be. I’m not making an ethical case. But it is evolutionarily functional.

Which brings us back to our feathered friends. Like chickens, we have an instinct towards pecking order. We constantly test ability and status. We trim the flock and ostracise the vulnerable. We cock and crow, posture and display. In constrained environments, when we perceive resources under threat, we can become vicious.

But to survive and to thrive, we also brood. We gather our young under shelter to protect their fragile bodies. We cooperate to build communal structures larger than ourselves. We respond to alarm calls. We build beautiful relationships and grieve our dead.

The same catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs forged all of it.

What Do We Do With That?

This is the part that interests me most.

If we acknowledge that we are products of devastation, if disaster is baked into our biology and our history and our culture, then like chickens we cannot pretend that cruelty, dominance or fear are anomalies. They are features. Evolutionarily ancient ones.

But knowing this changes the way we think about ourselves. Changes the stories we tell about each other.

The question is no longer why are humans like this. The question becomes what do we do about it.

Evolution gave us the capacity for violence, but unlike chickens, it also gave us the capacity for foresight. For moral imagination. For designing and implementing formal institutions that restrain our worst impulses and cultivate our best.

Chickens do not redesign their coops. Unfortunately, that was me, and I did a terrible job.

But together, we can.

We can acknowledge the dinosaur in us without letting it run wild in the herd. We can compete without pecking each other to death. We can choose cooperation over exclusion, even though exclusion sometimes feels older and more instinctive.

Catastrophe shaped us, just as it shaped chickens. But it does not have to rule us.

Reclaiming the Insult

Maybe we should be done with the trope. Stop calling people chickens when they hesitate.

Nature shows us that caution, that fear, is not weakness. It is information. An ancient survival signal wired into nervous systems forged in catastrophe.

The goal is not to eliminate fear. It is to respond to it with wisdom rather than instinct.

If anything, the insult has it backwards. The chicken is not a coward. It is a survivor from a lineage that endured planetary extinction.

Chickens are bold. They are brutal. They are resilient.

And so are we.

The difference is that we are the first species, as far as we know, with knowledge of the forces that made us. Capable of realising that our devastating nature can either repeat history or consciously bend it.

Of deciding that we are not separate from the cosmic emergency that formed us. We are an expression of it.

The real question is whether we continue pecking at one another, or whether we use our self awareness to build something less brutal than the furnace that forged us. 

One capable of withstanding it.