Canadian chicken tries to cross road, doesn't make it

It's a lazy, sunny September day here in Fort Mudge. Kind of a slow day, as Sundays sometimes are. Must be the same at CBC News, which ran a story about a chicken trying to cross the road in Hamilton ON. I hope CBC won't mind my republishing it, word for word. It's too good not to share, and so good that it doesn't need any embellishment.

Why did the chicken cross the road? One chicken in Hamilton tried to live out the old joke. The bird was stopping drivers as it wandered into traffic on Dundas Street in Dundas Thursday morning. Passers-by pulled over and got out of their cars as the chicken ran afoul, said one of those drivers, Andru Valpy.

Valpy called the Hamilton Police non-emergency line, who put him through to animal control services after a good laugh. "I didn't catch the joke at first," he said. "Sadly, the chicken did not make it to the other side. It was trying to go from the south side of Dundas to the north side of Dundas when I found him."

Animal Control instructed Valpy to grab the chicken from the road and look after it until they arrived. Before animal services got there, he took care of it for a half hour in the parking lot of a retirement home. "One of the neighbours gave (the chicken) some seed, made sure I was taken care of and the chicken was taken care of, more importantly," he said. The chicken is now recovering in the care of Animal Control.

So, why did the chicken attempt to cross the road? The answer is not clear. The neighbour believed the chicken could have flown from a passing truck carrying chickens, said Valpy. The chicken looked like it had been clipped. "We suspect it might have flown the coop and tried to start a new life," he said.

Animal Control told Valpy that if that were the case, the chicken would be going to a much better home now. "There's no yoking about that," Valpy said.

Why the chicken crossed the road

As explained by...

The Bible
And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Jesse Jackson
The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down.

Baltimore Police Department
Give us five minutes with the chicken and we'll find out.

Richard Nixon
The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road. I don't know any chickens. I have never known any chickens.

Ernest Hemingway
To die in the rain.

Martin Luther King Jr.
I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa Simpson
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Aristotle
It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Karl Marx
It was an historical inevitability.

Bashir Assad
This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Ronald Reagan
What chicken?

Machiavelli
The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end result of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Sigmund Freud
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates
I am about to release Chicken Coop 10, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. And Explorer is an inextricable part of the operating system.

Albert Einstein
Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton
I did not cross the road with that chicken. However, I did ask Vernon Jordan to find the chicken a job in New York.

Walt
Because the chicken lacks any reasoning or decision-making capabilities, it seems unlikely that the chicken's action was spurred by any particular motivation.