Cocksure

Around the time of her father's ignominious fall from grace as host of NBC Nightly News --on the exposure of his insertion of himself into scenes of Iraq War correspondence bravery that never happened-- a gif was making the rounds of Allison Williams' in the title role of a live TV production of Peter Pan self-consciously strutting and crowing toward the camera something like a Martian might be able to do if you described the behavior of barnyard fowl to it having only heard about it third hand yourself.  The passing off of this vague notion of how a rooster behaves as the confident bravado of a cocky rascal stuck in permanent boyhood was a bit too on-the-nose reminiscent of her father's hubristic predicament for it not to become a meme.  But even since that time, we as a society have become only more similarly removed from the ethology of the animals mysteriously groomed and exploited by Big Farm for our consumption.

I was made especially aware of this fact by where my family recently spent a late summer vacation -- in an outbuilding on the property of a working farm with a picture window overlooking the rockbound hillside enclosure for chickens, ducks, geese and an ovine or a bovine or two.  Every morning we were awakened by roosters crowing at the break of dawn to bring the day into being.  In the week that we were there, I literally saw the perpetual establishment of a pecking order, a bird or two flying the coop, birds of a feather flocking together, the chickens coming home to roost, a few mad wet hens, henpecking, games of chicken that ended with one contestant chickening out, the cock of the walk ruling the roost, the making of chicken scratch, ducks in a row, water rolling off a duck's back,  the sitting duck whose mates had wandered off without it noticing*, the quack whose dominance display was all bluff, the ducks who looked like a duck and quacked like a duck (as opposed to the geese who on closer inspection didn't), the goose chase in which the flock lined up in formation to collectively trace the meanderings of the lead goose, a silly goose, the black sheep, the cows coming home.  Not seen (thankfully): the fox in the henhouse, the wolf in sheep's clothing, anyone having a cow.  

For people of my generation, few are more than another generation or two from the last cohort for whom farm animals were among us.  My Ukrainian forebears had chickens in the outskirts of New York City.  For us, the meaning of most of the idioms in the preceding paragraph lies inertly in the phrase itself.   For my parents, farm life was everyday life.   The preceding litany of expressions were vividly understood from everyday experience.  Their days were partially filled by animal husbandry.   As a consequence, my parents and their parents and their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors dwelt in a world few of us experience anymore other than in the pages of a storybook.  My own imitation of a strutting crowing rooster would hardly outdo Allison Williams'.  But it wasn't that long ago that people could not help but absorb the behavior of the animals around them into the fabric of their lives, and naturally, their language reflected this closeness that people unavoidably had with the charming antics of the other species around them. 

And yet they still ate them.

~~~~~

* The woodsy setting of the farm had me expecting to wake up nightly to the squawks of one of the well-tended fowl being plucked from its roost by some forest predator, but it never happened.  Yet the precarity of free range life felt ever present.  I was struck by the cold mathematical logic of herd mentality-- large numbers of birds would loll in the noonday sun in close proximity to each other while the shadow of a hawk soaring above might suddenly stream across the ground, subtly illustrating that each member of the groups' safety hinged on someone else in the flock being snatched instead of itself.