Headless Chicken

For the past nine months, Jeremy has been traveling to Fruita, Colorado to work on a hospital there. On about his second visit, he returned home with a story about a headless chicken. Skeptical at first, I required a couple of sources before I would believe him. I never received confirmation so I eventually filed it away in the back of my head.


Today, I found this article on the interweb. Crazy stuff.

Did a rooster named Mike live for 18 months after having his head chopped off?
Strange but true. A farmer from Fruita, Colo., thought he was just putting dinner on the table when he picked up an axe and beheaded one of his chickens. What happened next became the stuff of legend: The headless rooster bobbed and weaved back to the henhouse and lived for 18 more months.

The animal, later dubbed Mike and celebrated with a festival, Web sites and various magazine articles, survived because the blade missed his jugular vein and a clot prevented him from bleeding to death. The axe blow landed high enough that most of the chicken's brain stem and one ear remained intact. Mike was fed and watered by inserting an eyedropper directly into his gullet. Sadly, he later choked to death in a motel room. Residents of Fruita remember Mike as "a big fat chicken who didn't know he didn't have a head."

*Sources: msn.com, my husband, Jeremy and co-worker Chad. Both Jeremy and Chad claimed to have visited the monument erected in downtown Fruita honoring Mike.