Did you know that, as of 2017, there were approximately 22 billion chickens in the world? Keep that in mind as you read this story.
According to the Guardian, officials at a farming school in northwestern France believe the chickens in their henhouse killed a fox who had snuck into their coop in the middle of the night. The fox’s corpse was discovered by students the next morning, who presumably backed out of the space carefully, maintaining eye contact with the blood-thirsty fowl the whole time.
“There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks,” Pascal Daniel, the head of farming at Brittany’s Le Gros Chêne school, told AFP.
Perhaps these were simply unusually aggressive chickens, emboldened by the lenient free-range policy at Le Gros Chêne. Perhaps the fox was already injured, or unusually weak. Or perhaps, after millennia of being cooped up in gross henhouses, of being turned into meat salads and piccata, of being a synonym for “cowardly”, and having terrible jokes made at their expense, chickens have finally had enough. Perhaps, the 22 billion have decided that the time has come to usurp the 7 billion.
Whatever the case may be, I hope the chickens reading this will know how much I admire them and their beauty and their work ethic and the humility they show in never learning to fly. Please don’t kill me.
