Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Birdbraining

There's a photograph/meme going around that got me thinking. It talks about a hen who sat several duck eggs. When the eggs hatched, because baby ducks are very similar to baby chicks, she just treated them like you would any other baby...  essentially, they were assigned chicken at birth. But... and it's a big but. You put a baby duck in the water, it's happy as a lark.  You put a baby chick in water, it drowns. You can imagine the first trip to the farm pond, poor chicken was running in circles, clucking her head off, "oh, god, my babies are gonna die..." But apparently, by the third trip, she accepted that her children identified (correctly) as ducks, she accepted them... and now, if the farm has any duck eggs to hatch, they give them to her. 


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