Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (22 page)

But chicken as food may have been an afterthought. Long ago, when we first took or enticed it from its forest home, the bird was more than a cheap lunch. It was magical and practical at the same time. Along with its powers of divination, its delicate bones could be used for sewing or tattooing or to make small musical instruments. The rooster's magnificent feathers could adorn ornamental clothing.
The bird had well-known medicinal properties and its martial abilities provided entertainment. As a sacrifice to the gods, the small and fast-reproducing animal was ideal.

Amid familiar mammals like dogs and cats and cows, however, the chicken retains an almost alien quality. The male can be fierce and even terrifying when defending its turf, all out of proportion with its small size, while the bird's reptilian feet and downy feathers make for an unsettling combination. Jerky movements give the bird a disturbingly robotic quality, while its voracious appetite for sex with multiple partners is impressive to some and offensive to others. We veer between admiration and disgust and between fascination and fear in our long relationship with the chicken. This ambivalence mirrors our shifting attitudes toward God, sex, gender, and all that we consider both sensual and monstrous.

8.

The Little King

Why are the cocks not crowing, he muttered to himself, and repeated the question anxiously, as if the cocks' crowing might be the last hope of salvation.

—José Saramago,
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

T
he cock has no cock. That's no Zen Buddhist riddle. The rooster lacks a penis. Or, to be more accurate, it lost it, which is a rather odd fact for the animal that more than any other is the zoological stand-in for the human male organ. The mystery of how the chicken phallus vanished was recently solved, although why it vanished remains a matter of some controversy among the small but dedicated band of bird-penis researchers.

When chickens mate, a casual spectator might be forgiven for thinking that fowl sex is similar to that of mammals. The rooster mounts the hen, takes a firm grip of her back with his claws, and uses his beak to hold on to her head. Then he hops off. It is usually over in less time than a Filipino cockfight. Though it can be a similarly raucous affair, two birds have exchanged a cloacal kiss.

The cloaca, from the Latin word for sewer, is a busy place. In the chicken—as well as all birds, reptiles, and amphibians—the cloaca
is the single-lane end of the urinary and digestive tracts, and it also serves reproductive duties. Like human males, roosters have two testes, though these are internal organs tucked under the kidneys rather than dangling on the outside. A healthy rooster can produce more than 8 billion sperm in every ejaculation that are transferred into the hen when they invert their cloacae and press them together. It only takes a few seconds. The sperm in her oviduct can fertilize eggs in her single ovary for up to a month after they mate.

A few species of birds, mainly waterfowl, do have penises. For example, ducks have long corkscrew-shaped peckers. A team overseen by Martin Cohn at the University of Florida, Gainesville, investigated why ducks and chickens differ in this respect. They cut small windows into eggs to view both male duck and chicken embryos, and found that both began to develop penises for the first nine days of development, after which growth in chickens stopped and the proto-organ shriveled up. On day nine, the chicken embryos began to manufacture a protein responsible for shriveling the would-be penis from the tip down. That protein also is tied to the loss of nascent chicken teeth during early development and it influences beak shape and feathers. It is essentially a chemical that kills off selected cells. When the researchers coated the would-be chicken penis with another protein that blocked the shriveling effects, it kept growing. Coating a duck penis with the cell-killing chicken protein reversed its growth.

Cohn thinks this organ loss was simply a consequence of dropping other body parts like teeth and limbs. This particular disruptive protein clearly plays a major role in bird evolution, and losing the penis was just a side effect. Other biologists suspect that the change is the result of female selection, which led to the evolution of the cooperative cloacal kiss over rougher penetrative sex. Male ducks are notorious for forcing copulation on uncooperative mates and sometimes even drown their mates in the process. Such battles of the sexes reduce the odds for fertilization. Over time, most bird species, including the chicken, may have selected males with smaller penises while others, notably ducks, geese, and swans, kept theirs.

How the penis vanished in chickens—and most birds—could tell
us much more about evolution, such as how snakes lost their legs and what causes birth defects in human genitalia, which are particularly susceptible to malformations in the womb. The research conceivably could lead to practical ways to correct those defects before birth. “Genitalia, dear readers, are where the rubber meets the road, evolutionarily,” wrote the biologist Patricia Brennan from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in
Slate
. She was responding to an outcry by some media commentators outraged that federal tax money would be spent on chicken penis research. “To fully understand why some individuals are more successful than others during reproduction, there may be no better place to look.”

Losing the penis also might ultimately have given the chicken a slightly higher fertility rate than those other common farm birds outside the family of Galliformes. But in losing its cock, it is possible that the chicken may have gained the world.

Biology can't explain why our favored slang word for the male organ refers to a bird that lacks one. Americans blush at a word bandied about shamelessly by Canadians, Australians, British, and other English speakers, who still use it without hesitation when describing the male chicken. Eighteenth-century New England Puritans excised
cock
, a word that likely derives from the sound of a chicken—it comes from the ancient Aryan word
kak
, which translates as “to cackle”—from the American lexicon.

These were, after all, people who punished those wicked souls who celebrated Christmas. Puritans did not oppose sex and were harsh critics of celibacy for Roman Catholic clergy, but double entendres led the mind and body astray and therefore were not to be tolerated. Two centuries before, in Elizabethan times, one poem begins with the line “I have a gentle cock” and ends with: “And every night he perches in my lady's chamber.” This bawdy tradition continued for centuries. The 1785
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
notes that the phrase “cock alley” means “the private parts of a woman.”

In the American colonies, the more anodyne
rooster
began to re
place
cock
just before the revolution, starting in the north and spreading south. The term derives from an Old English word for the perch of a domestic fowl. In the young United States,
haycocks
became
haystacks
,
weathercocks
became
weathervanes
, and
water cocks
became
faucets
. Even
cockroaches
turned into just plain
roaches
. “Victoria was not crowned in England until 1838, but a Victorian movement against naughty words had been in full blast in this country since the beginning of the century,” H. L. Mencken notes sardonically in
American Language.
Cock
had to go because it had acquired “an indelicate anatomical significance.” In Britain, the word continues to be used in all its glorious ambiguity. Well into the Victorian era,
cock
was still preferred among British doctors as a descriptor of the human organ over the more newfangled term
penis
, adopted from the French but originating in Latin.

The cock most likely acquired this “indelicate anatomical significance” due to extremely randy behavior—and research demonstrates that the male chicken prefers new partners to familiar ones. Scientists call this salacious behavior the “Coolidge effect.” During separate tours of a chicken farm by President Calvin Coolidge and his wife in the 1920s, Mrs. Coolidge remarked on a rooster that was busy mating. She was told that this behavior took place dozens of times daily. “Tell that to the president when he comes by,” she said coolly. When the message was relayed, the president asked if the rooster mated with the same hen. He was told no, that the male preferred a variety of partners. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge,” he responded.

The chicken's reproductive vigor has long impressed humans. The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in the early centuries AD in today's Iraq, mentions the custom of Jews carrying a hen and cock before a bridal couple, a tradition that continues in parts of the Middle East. This ritual was not just about fertility. The Greek god Zeus gave the handsome Ganymede a live rooster, and older aristocratic Athenians in Aristotle's day presented their young male lovers with such a bird. There is no mistaking the sexual reference at Delos, near an ancient temple to Apollo, where a large column dating to Aristotle's day supports an anatomically correct massive erect human penis and
testicles. Just below is a carved rooster, its head and neck in the form of a phallus. “Throughout classical antiquity,” writes the art historian Lorrayne Baird, “the cock serves as icon and symbol of the male erotic urge.”

In classical art, roosters pull Eros's chariot, watch Mars and Venus make love, or observe Menelaus seizing Helen of Troy. In a Berlin museum, a Greek vase dating to 500 BC is decorated with a line of black-robed men dressed as roosters in a drama chorus, following a piper. Nearby stands a small bronze statue of a rooster man, dating to early Roman times and dug up near Mount Vesuvius. He has a high swept-back comb that gives him a punk-Mohawk look. The lips are drawn back in pleasure as enormous wattles droop down to his breast. He has pushed aside the fabric around his waist to expose a massive phallus as long as his torso, held aloft by his right hand and the sheer force of the erection.

Hidden from public view in the Vatican archives is a small bronze bust of uncertain date. It has the upper torso of a human male and the head of a rooster. In place of the beak is a massive and anatomically exact penis that takes up most of the face. Inscribed in Greek on the base are the words
SAVIOR OF THE WORLD
. For a century or so it was on display until an appalled eighteenth-century cardinal complained. Its authenticity has been questioned, but a similar bust now in a German collection was found in an ancient Greek temple, suggesting that this rooster-as-savior concept dates back at least to Socrates's time.

Lots of farmyard animals—goats and dogs come to mind—are frisky, but along with the rooster's sexual prowess comes its unique announcement of the coming of the light. To the ancients, dawn was a religious event tied to the creation and re-creation of life itself. “In Nature man generates man,” Aristotle wrote, “but the process presupposes . . . solar heat.” Associated with the rooster is a long list of solar gods, from the Greek Apollo and the goddesses Leto and Asteria to the popular Roman-Persian deity Mithras and Zoroaster's Ahura Mazda. The piece of pottery from Egypt, the first clear depiction of the bird, that Carter found in the Valley of the Kings, might be tied to the solar cult of Akhenaten, while the image on the ivory box in
Mesopotamia's Assur hints at the bird's connection with the Shamash deity later favored by Babylon's last king, Nabonidus.

By the time of Christ, roosters were common images in temples from Persia to Egypt to Britain and their sacrificed remains show up in tombs from Turkey to Britain. “They declare the cock to be sacred to the sun, and the herald to announce the coming of the sun,” declared the second-century AD geographer Pausanias while passing through southern Greece. Even among Jews, who long considered chickens unclean animals, the rooster crow was the signal to say a benediction. “Praised be to the Lord my God for giving the cock the intelligence to distinguish between day and night,” goes an old Jewish morning prayer. In ancient China and Japan, the cock symbolized the sun. “Lo, the raving lions, / They dare not face and gaze upon the cock / Who's wont with wings to flap away the night,” wrote Titus Lucretius Carus in his first-century BC treatise
On the Nature of Things.

Given this wealth of tradition, the rooster's early emergence as the single most important animal symbol of Christianity makes more sense. Jesus is associated with the lamb and the fish, the Holy Spirit with the dove. The lion, ox, and eagle represent three of the four gospel writers. Even peacocks were borrowed to symbolize saints. But over all of these, often even above the highest cross, atop thousands of steeples and domes around the world, a weathercock glints. These are ostensibly reminders of Jesus's warning to Peter that he would deny his teacher three times before the cock crowed twice on the day of Christ's crucifixion. But the bird's heralding of light and promise of resurrection are deeply interwoven in Christian tradition. Jesus's birth, Peter's denial, and the Easter resurrection were said to have taken place at the cock's crow. In a popular fourth-century AD hymn, the bird is called “the messenger of dawn” that, like Jesus, “calls us back to life” and wakes those who are sick, sleepy, and lazy. Like Christ, the rooster restores health, awareness, and faith. “God, the Creator Himself, becomes a sort of divine cock,” writes Baird.

The connection between the rooster and the new religion was strongest at the heart of Western Christianity, in Rome, where tombs
of early converts were carved with fowl engaged in sacred combat. Peter was crucified on Vatican Hill in the first century AD, and one historian suggests that he assumed the doorkeeper role of the old Roman god Janus. According to ancient Etruscan beliefs, Janus was the sun and the cock was his sacred bird of dawn. The key symbolizes this deity, whose name means
archway
in Latin, and who stood guard at the gate of heaven. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” Christ told Peter, whose name means
rock
, in the gospels.