Video posted on YouTube back in April 2019 shows the moment a couple of farmers showed the world a special technique on how to hypnotize a chicken.
The video is quite educational and hilarious, starting off with a guy explaining that his neighbor knows how to hypnotize a chicken and they are to film it to show you how.
The farmer gently holding the chicken in his hands places the chicken’s head near the ground while another guy places his finger in the dirt right in front of the bird’s beak.
Starting at the chicken’s beak, the man proceeds to draw a line in the dirt away from the chicken, and almost immediately, the chicken’s body goes limp.
The astonished man filming continues to explain how it works saying that the bird’s eyes will stay fixated on the line. We’re going to tell you how it works but first, did you know there’s a whole Wikipedia page about hypnotizing chickens?
On the page states, “A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, with its head down near the ground, by drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes.”
Ethologists actually refer to this state as ‘tonic immobility’ which is a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when they are presented with a threat. They further say that this is probably a defensive mechanism intended to pretend it’s dead.
The video ends with one of the guys erasing the line in the dirt which promptly releases the bird from its hypnotized state. It immediately jumps up, pecking and attacking the man’s finger.