You can if you think you can

Entry posted by Guest · March 19, 2005

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usually, i really hate those sappy, feel-good "you can if you think you can" type stories (i mean, REALLY), but i have one to relate that is 100% real and can fill up a blog entry very nicely indeed. first, let me introduce the cast. i was going to change their names to protect their identities, but i decided i didnt need to, mainly since theyre all chickens:

Attila the Hun - a Sumatra, among the very top of the pecking order, big, strong, mean, a real lady's man, and he gets anything he wants; so named because he is such a fierce fighter.

Little Boy - a Leghorn, close to the very bottom of the pecking order, small, weak, extremely unagressive, tends to just run instead of fighting, and is lucky if a hen will even come when he finds food; hes so named simply because Maman couldnt come up with anything better.

Wattle - a Sumatra, like Attila, though more towards the bottom of the pecking order; he is not a very interesting character, nor does he play much of a part in the story, so theres no need for detail about him.

it was early this morning and still pretty dark. i was going out to feed the chickens, and i saw two cocks (male chickens over one year old) fighting. one i could tell was a Sumatra, but i couldnt tell who, and the other was Little Boy. Little Boy seemed to be winning well, which was a mild surprise since he hardly won any fights at all. I usually break up any fights i come across because both the looser and the winner can be seriously injured, and any change in the pecking order, no matter how small, forces all the rest of the cocks to reaffirm their rank.....meaning about a week and a half of non-stop fighting, which is not conducive to the hen's good egg production. so i picked the Sumatra up and was going to put him elsewhere to break up that fight, when i got out from under the trees and into a little more light, i realized it was Attila the Hun! Little Boy, the wimp, was winning a fight with one of the biggest bad-asses around! (just to give you an analogy of how surprising that was, it would be like me beating up Mike Tyson....yeah. picture that, if you will). I realized that Little Boy thought (mistakenly) that he was fighting waddle (chickens see very poorly in the dark, so Little Boy couldnt tell), who he might have been able to beat, while he was, in fact, fighting Attila......he was winning simple because he thought he could. so there you have it, a perfect underdog story with a perfectly sappy moral, "you can if you think you can". i really wish i had let Little Boy win.