Chicken tracks

It’s no longer a joke line. There are big bucks being spent nowadays trying to answer that question.

Ag producers know that today’s shoppers are willing to pay a premium for meats that are cage-free, organic or wild caught. But how do you really know if the chicken you are eating spent its life happily pecking for corn or if your blackberries were grown locally and are pesticide free?

Put a tracking device on it. No kidding.

A GPS tracker strapped to the leg of a chicken has the potential of allowing the consumer to know every step that a chicken has taken before it enters the packing plant. ZhongAn Online, a Chinese insurance company, has already outfitted more than 100,000 chickens with trackers.

The sensors upload information, such as how much exercise each chicken gets and what it ate. The company says this technology will be on 2,500 farms in China by next year. What’s more, they are also working on facial-recognition technology so that consumers can one day make sure the organic chicken they saw on the farm is the same one that ends up on their plate.

I suppose this is progress. But ask yourself, do I really want a personal relationship with something I’m about to eat?

Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon character of Looney Tunes fame, comes to mind. The tall, overweight rooster with a Southern accent starred in 29 cartoon features from 1946 to 1964 – decades before GPS tracking was even a possibility. But I can’t help wondering what Foghorn would have to say about his harem of hens strapped with trackers.

In Portlandia’s pilot television episode, two diners question their server about the organic bona fides of the chicken. To reassure them that their entrée was not only healthy but happy, their server provides them with the chicken’s bio and photo!

History reveals unusual relationships between mankind and his chickens.

Chickens accompanied Roman legions. Their behavior was carefully observed before battle; a good appetite meant victory was likely. According to the writings of Cicero, when one contingent of birds refused to eat before a sea battle in 249 B.C., an angry consul threw them overboard. History records that he was defeated.

Artistic depictions of rooster combatants are scattered throughout the ancient world, such as in a first century A.D. mosaic adorning a house in Pompeii. The ancient Greek city of Pergamum established a cockfighting amphitheater to teach valor to future generations of soldiers.

According to legend dating back to fifth century B.C., the Athenian general Themistocles, while on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting by the side of a road in Greece. He summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.”

This tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce.

The fact is that the male of the species can be quite a fierce animal, especially when bred and trained for fighting. Nature armed the rooster with a bony leg spur; humans supplemented that feature with an arsenal of metal spurs and small knives strapped to the bird’s leg. Obviously, GPS tracking devices involve leg straps of a different sort.

Cockfighting is illegal in the United States — Louisiana was the last state to ban it, in 2008 — and generally viewed by Americans as inhumane. But in the parts of the world where it is still practiced, legally or illegally, it has claims to being the world’s oldest continual sport.

Oddly enough, in contemporary language the use of “chicken” is usually associated with cowardice (“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”) or neurotic anxiety (“Running around like a chicken without a head”).  But that hasn’t kept the University of South Carolina from choosing a Gamecock as its sporting mascot. “Gamecocks” is a unique moniker, not just in the SEC but among sporting teams nationwide.

The choice is actually founded in honor of Thomas Sumter, a Revolutionary War hero from South Carolina. He was nicknamed the “Carolina Gamecock” after a British general said Sumter “fought like a gamecock.”

Maybe this rambling collection of thought doesn’t come to mind whenever you think about chickens. Perhaps your only personal contact with chickens is in choosing white or brown eggs in the cartons at the grocery store. I suspect there’s a whole generation of young mothers out there who’ve yet to serve fried chicken if you discount the likes of Kentucky Fried Chicken or Popeye’s or other food franchises and stores. We don’t think very much on chickens, do we?

But each Easter that changes, if only in choosing to eat those yellow marshmallow chicks among the colored eggs.

As for me, I can’t help remembering all the chickens my grandparents raised for eggs and meat. Chick delivery meant thousands of peeping critters scurrying beneath heating lamps, egg gathering chores, chickens literally running around with their heads cut off, and all the foul smells you actually forget due to that mouth-watering aroma once a chicken sizzles in a the frying pan.

Sometimes I feel fortunate to live in memories of times past. I don’t have to think about GPS tracking devices or confronting decisions on what chicken I want to eat based on digital knowledge. Maybe this is progress. But if we’ve become that distrustful about our food chain, it makes me want to scream, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”