No, not books, I’m left here with an odd question, why do hens run? Looked across nearest paddock yesterday morning around 10am to see two of my hens going down that like racehorses. Came in just now and as I paused to look out of the kitchen window, two hens flashed past heading up the front lawn going like feathered rockets. They don’t seem to be running from anything, or chasing after anything. So why are they hurtling headlong around the place? And there is the other thought on that, if I do find out it may end up as the plot for a story. Odd events with my bathsalts a year or so back produced a tale entitled Bathsalts and Bedlam – which has just appeared in the lastest issue of TALES OF THE TALISMAN.
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We had chickens when I was a kid, and Mom used to tell us that hens run like that when they have “spring fever”, meaning just because they’re happy. Did a search to see if there was another take on it, and found this site – https://books.google.com/books with a book called “Horse Hoeing Husbandry, Fifth Edition”. On page 657, it states that “Adult hens rarely play. One game they do enjoy is the sprint: sometimes hens will run for no reason.” The original publication was circa 1730’s, but they’ve been updated and annotated in 2008, 2010. Hope this helps!
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in other words, sometimes hens just run because they feel like it. That makes sense. And it’s nice that if the book is right, part of that is that they’re happy. The thing I did notice, is that any time I’ve seen them running that way, there’s been two of them. Part of the fun?