At my high school class reunion in September, my co-emcee Russ Walske told a funny joke about a three-legged chicken. As I remember it, it went like this:
I was driving along a rural road one day when I saw a three-legged chicken running down the road. I was amused enough to drive alongside it for a while, and I noticed the chicken was running 30 miles per hour.
“Pretty fast chicken,” I thought. “I wonder just how fast it can run.” So I sped up, and the chicken did too! We were now moving along the road at 45 miles per hour! I sped up again, and to my surprise the chicken was still running ahead of me at 60 miles per hour! Suddenly the chicken turned off the road and ran down a long driveway leading to a farmhouse. I followed the chicken to the house and saw a man in the yard with dozens of three-legged chickens. I called out to the farmer, “How did you get all these three-legged chickens?”
The farmer replied, “I breed ‘em. Ya see, it’s me, my wife, and my son living here and we all like drumsticks. Since a chicken only has two legs, I started breeding this three-legged variety so we could all eat our favorite piece.”
“That’s amazing!” I said. “How do they taste?”
“Don’t rightly know, I ain’t been able to catch one yet!”
Well, Russ’ story got me thinking about the kind of genetic engineering that is possible today, so I checked with my friends at Google, and there are many articles about three-legged chickens and even some very weird-looking pictures of mutant birds.
There was also a link to a YouTube of Ronald Reagan telling basically the same story at some political speech. (He didn’t tell it as well as Russ did!)
Among the articles (most of them pretty amusing) was one about an Iowa farmer who allegedly is the first person to successfully breed a three-legged chicken. The article says that Warren Milledge, of Ackley, Iowa, explained why he came up with his plan to breed the freaks, and his explanation was surprisingly like the joke above. Here’s the gist of Mr. Milledge’s interview. I’ll let you decide whether you think it’s true! It sounds pretty much like Russ’ joke to me.
“You see, it was when there were just the three of us, this was before our son Benjamin was married. I love a drumstick, Ben loves a drumstick, and mother loves a drumstick, but as you know a chicken only has two legs so only two drumsticks. That meant roasting two chickens each time so there were enough drumsticks.
“One day a Divine Providence visited this humble Iowa farm. A chick was born with two normal legs and a smaller, non-functioning leg that sort of twitched a bit. You’ve probably seen pictures of two-headed snakes or two-headed cows and sheep and whatnot. Well, this was along those lines.
“Normally those freak animals don’t survive birth, but this little chicken, we eventually found out he was a rooster, was very lively so I chose him for breeding and after a few peeps, which is what we call bunches of newborn chicks for you city fellers, we got two more chicks with those little legs. So we started breeding those two with the rooster and eventually achieved chicks with fully functional third legs. There was a short piece in Iowa Farmer’s Digest and that’s when KFC got involved.”
Then the article quotes someone named Purvis Jones, a spokesperson for KFC, who confirmed that the fast food company was very interested in the three-legged chickens, and that they had approached Milledge with the idea of being one of their key breeders.
“The long range plan for us is to offer meals with three drumsticks, but that is a few years away.”
“Yep, that’s true,” said Milledge, with a slight laugh. “The problem, well … we have a big problem with the three-leggers. You see, we don’t yet know how these chickens taste because, well, do you have any idea how fast a three-legged chicken can run? Well, it’s pretty fast, I’ll tell you fer darn sure. We haven’t caught one yet.”
What do you think?
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