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Don't let clerk hypnotize you like a chicken
By Carole Cloudwalker
This document was published online on Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Despite our area's great agricultural heritage, we can just forget about applying lipstick to pigs here in Park County.
That's true for several reasons:
-There is no real mystique to it -it's more physical than metaphysical.
-Lipstick costs plenty.
-The pig resents this sort of attention.
-We all know, as one high-ranking political candidate recently remarked, “It's still a pig” once the barnyard cosmetology has been accomplished.
In other words, lipsticking a pig proves nothing.
And besides, our Park County Clerk, Kelly Jensen, has an even trickier trick from the barnyard, and one with a potentially useful purpose.
Raised in rural Meeteetse, Jensen says she spent her misspent youth out by the henhouse, hypnotizing chickens for fun and profit.
Well, for fun, anyway. She says she never was a professional chicken hypnotizer, though she's rendered quite a few members of the poultry world helpless by her skills.
Yes, it's quite true. It can be done.
It's even on Wikipedia. You know you've arrived when that Internet source recognizes you or your talent. While Jensen has so far personally escaped Wikipedia's notice, the knack of chicken hypnotizing has not.
Jensen says when she was about 13 - that notoriously awkward age - she enjoyed several interesting pastimes, ranging from baton twirling (she's still a whiz, and can switch to using a wooden pointer if there's no actual baton handy), to knocking out chickens by nonviolent means.
They stay out, too. Internet sources say the feathered friends of Col. Sanders can be still for up to a half-hour. One man claims he tested this on 10 chickens at the same time, and it worked. They all were lying in a row, not moving.
Why it works at all is mysterious, so right away it's vastly better than trying to smear lipstick on pigs. Or chickens, who have no lips in any case, so good luck with that project.
Jensen outlined the simple steps involved in chicken hypnotizing.
“You catch a chicken and place it on the ground (right-side up) with its beak straight out,” the clerk explains.
“You put your finger at the tip of its beak and draw a straight line in the dirt, going away from the chicken.”
For some unknown reason, possibly some twisted defense mechanism in which the bird thinks it is feigning death, if pathetically, to be left alone by a predator, it remains still.
“The hypnotized chicken just lies there, staring at the line,” Jensen maintains.
As a doubting 13-year-old, Jensen had to make sure the first chicken she'd wrangled to the ground wasn't simply a fluke bird that was particularly sensitive to a farm girl's hypnotic wiles.
“So I tried it with a variety of chickens,” she says.
They all succumbed, at least for a brief time.
“Does hypnotizing chickens make me a Chicken Whisperer?” Jensen wondered aloud.
As a former Wapiti chicken owner myself, I had no answer to this interesting question from one of our top county leaders.
For example, did she actually whisper to the birds, or merely hold them down and draw lines away from them in the dirt?
That information was lacking, and it seemed crucial to obtain before responding. After all, I freely admit that I never hypnotized anything, and certainly not chickens.
I do play the recorder, a whistle-like instrument, and have wondered if I do that well enough to lull a king cobra, say. But I've decided that finding out I couldn't might prove hazardous to my health. Besides, king cobras are not indigenous to Wapiti that I know of.
There is an unfortunate sidebar to this chicken hypnotizing story, though.
The Internet explains that hypnotizing chickens can come in handy if you have a whole flock to slaughter, but find yourself without any help.
The suggestion is that you catch the birds one at a time, hypnotize them and while they are lying still, dispatch them with a swing of your axe.
Ouch.
It's harsh, yes, but could be effective.
Smart chickens would make one last wish known, though.
No, not a cigarette or a hearty meal. They would ask you to apply lipstick to their lips before they die.
That should prolong their lives by quite a bit while you search for a place on their anatomy to doll up.
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