If You See the Buddha on the Road.... Peck Him!

“So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.”
--Ajahn Sumedho

On one level, the Buddhist injunction to simply accept the fact of our existence as an individual cell of awareness, lonely and immutably unsatisfied, holds a certain intellectual honesty which can be very appealing.  External gratification, in the form of a real and palpable knowledge that someone out there loves us, is at the core of 99% of what people have always done once their basic physical needs (food, shelter, health) have been met.

We are lonely, and we want to be loved, or at the very least accepted without judgment – wants which seem simple enough in the abstract, but which run smack into the brick wall of frustrating reality, when there are bills to pay, children to raise, employers to please, neighbors to appease, and a whole host of other pratfalls of living in society.  The Buddhist importation recognizes that we can be one with the universe, or we can be one apart from the universe, but we are most assuredly just one, either way.

So how does this relate to chickens? 

Glad you asked.  The pecking order of a flock of chickens provides endless food for thought; musings on the nature of loneliness and togetherness are perfectly natural in the context of a family of birds whose entire world consists of each other and their relatively small stomping grounds.  They are seldom “alone” in the sense that they are always around each other; however, it is very easy to spot a lonely chicken in the midst of a throng of hens.

To begin at the beginning, chickens are quite obviously not Buddhists, or at the least, they are very poor Buddhists.  The idea of eating a vegetarian diet would strike a chicken as an absurdity.  Sure, grass, veggies, grain, bread, weeds, roots, etc. are all tasty enough… but toss them a piece of fish, a bug, a worm, a frog, or even a wounded fellow chicken, and see how long their peaceful, fun-loving vegan outlook on life lasts.  These are the closest living relatives of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and despite their diminutive statures, they won’t let you forget it if you dangle red meat in their faces.

Chickens are not particularly peace-loving, either.  Certainly their default setting is to not raise a ruckus, because ruckus-raising heightens their evolutionary memory of jungle dangers.  In the wild woods of Indonesia, Gallus gallus runs the risk of being taken down by a wide variety of predators if interflock squabbles last too long.  However, just because they are not always fighting each other does not mean that they won’t fight each other.  Who gets to eat first, who gets to sleep first, who gets to lay eggs in the prime nesting spot, who gets to make fun of whom first, these are all questions settled by a good swift nip at the neck.  His holiness the Dalai Lama would never act this way.

This is to paint as ugly a picture of chicken society as you might wish to see, and we won’t blame you if you choose to ignore these uglier aspects of capon personalities.  Don’t worry, though, there is a happy side of the coop, an element of chickenhood which can serve as inspiration rather than as just so much more grist for our cynical mills.

Chickens are fundamentally social.  A lone chicken is a miserable chicken.  We have witnessed time and again how a chicken who is in any way separate from the flock simply will not thrive.  However, when that lone hen is incorporated into the flock, she not only thrives, she essentially swells.  (Yes, Myrtle, yes, there have been numerous examples of Homo sapiens swelling, too, we know; it was not meant to be insulting.) 

There are a wide variety of reasons why this social character evolved in Gallus gallus, and why it remains important for Gallus gallus domesticus, including but not limited to defense of the flock against predators and incursions of territory by other flocks, improved heat-retention for the flock during roosting time in the middle of winter, and (my personal favorite) an extension of health-self-monitoring – by observing the relative health of those above and below themselves in the pecking order, as determined by the brightness and size of their “red flappies”, a chicken is able to determine more or less how healthy they are.  Of course, we assume this is some kind of ingrained behavior, because, let’s face it, chicken brains are not particularly complicated…

Which brings us to a further consideration – an individual chicken is, and there is no polite way to say this, a dumb creature.  A flock of chickens, on the other hand, can be counted on to behave in a manner which is more or less beneficial for the whole. 

Oh, if only people were like that…

Still, this social cohesion on the part of the chicken comes from a necessity which humans, lonely as we may sometimes feel, do not necessarily share.  While we do not know precisely what degree of self-awareness our avian friends possess, we can be fairly certain it does not match that of a human being, at least a human being who is subsisting higher than the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

And precisely because chickens are not self-aware, they are allowed to more or less “step skip” on this hierarchy by means of being collectively aware.  Chickens respond more or less proportionately to real or perceived dangers – if a possum or a raccoon breaks into the coop, the lead hen makes a great deal of noisy fuss and bother, and either all (or most) of the hens escape, or the invader flees, or the farmer is awakened and comes out (albeit in bathrobe and flip flops) to groggily shoo away the unwanted guest.  Whatever the outcome of this decision tree, order is very quickly restored, and the event is completely forgotten.

Humans are different.  We hang on to irrational fears much, much longer.  We have observed many times in the last decade how disproportionately Americans have reacted to the terrorist activities on September 11, 2001.  In a nation of more than 300 million people, less than 3,000 were killed in an attack the nature of which made it unreplicatable for most of the population of the country – that is because of those 300 million people, very few actually work in high rise buildings in cities where terrorists would be likely to strike.

So, yes, the murder of many of our fellow citizens was an emotionally charged and tragic event, requiring a response.  But how long should fear of this event have taken hold in places like Laramie, Wyoming, or Llano, Texas, or Bangor, Maine, or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or any of hundreds (nay, thousands) of communities all across the country, where visceral emotional responses to the attacks by a subset of fundamentalist Muslims (renounced time and again, by the way, by mainstream practitioners of Islam) still resound?

In some places, Islamophobia has actually gotten worse as the years go by, not better.  We could write a fairly long treatise on that subject, of course, but the point here is actually about something deeper – the isolated feeling that keeps individual people, in this case millions of individual Americans, stuck on the “safety” level of the needs pyramid.  The plain and simple truth is, we know several Muslim Americans who have been every bit as fearful of attacks on American soil by Islamic extremists as any dyed-in-the-wool White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant could be.  Sometimes difference is enough to ignite irrational fear; in this case, it is not the difference, it is the violent imagery which was timed perfectly to exploit pre-existing insecurity.

We suspect 9-11 might not have had such a lasting impact if it were not so vivid a symbol of more general fears – terrorism is something you can point at as a specific threat, however worries about our health, our jobs, our families, whether we will have housing, food on the table, or even clean air and water… these are things which Americans have grown accustomed in the last half century to not questioning.  But even before those four jets were hijacked, and we watched as 3,000 of our fellow citizens perished in a wanton act of violent murder, we were already fearful of creeping, nameless erosions of our feeling of safety.

If we were chickens, we would have been paying attention as those stout and healthy scientists and social observers with their bright red flappies were clucking significantly to warn us of degraded standards for our food, water, climate, social safety net, and financial controls.  Instead, though, we are dependent entirely upon the collective ability of each of us to individually navigate the sometimes overwhelming mountains of information necessary to evaluate what, exactly, is happening.  Little wonder we retreat to “reality” TV and turn to infotainment instead of actual news.  If we forget how to seem, we put on generic clothes (or opinions, as the case may be) and just hope for the best.

Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” ably westernizes several Buddhist concepts, but the best takeaway from the story is the idea that “Anybody can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  It takes coming down to the cities to prove that you are able to live among your flock and make everyone around you better off for your having achieved individual enlightenment.

Chickens don’t have that burden, but by watching them nip and peck at each other, we think maybe, just maybe, we humans can make our own version of flock behavior work out a little better than we have up ‘til now.  It’s worth a shot, anyway.

Happy farming!