22 October
'Chickens do not avoid Mike who, however, has shown no tendency to mate.'
This was how Life magazine captioned a photo of a headless chicken called Mike in a story it ran on 22 October 1945. A farmer in Fruita, Colorado, had missed his aim when he went to chop off Mike’s head, leaving the bottom part of his brain stem and now open oesophagus intact.
When the headless Mike didn’t die, the farmer spotted an opportunity to make more money out of him than he’d ever have got from selling him as meat. Feeding him with an eyedropper direct into his oesophagus, he put him on show in Salt Lake City, where he charged people 25 cents apiece to have a look.
Red Pepper by email
Get the latest articles and updates in your inbox
Workers unite online
They're logging on to combat lagging labour laws, costly court proceedings, and outsourcing management, writes Gaia Caramazza
Review – Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain
Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain, by Amrit Wilson, reviewed by Maya Goodfellow
The political whiteness of #MeToo
We need to confront how the movement is shaped by the power of whiteness, write Alison Phipps
Brexit’s drug problem
For all the talk of free-trade, why is ‘Global Britain’ still behind on drug law reform? By Kojo Koram
