When you drive a hatchet through the neck of a chicken, rendering it decapitated, it tends to thrash about here or there for a little while. Generally one won’t live eighteen more months, only to asphyxiate on some corn lodged in his exposed esophagus in a motel room in Arizona. Such is why the story of Mike the Headless Chicken is arguably the most recounted chicken decapitation story in America.

There’s really no wrong way to tell this story: Mike was an unnamed, anonymous 2.5-lb. bird living in Fruita, Colorado when he was chosen to die by farmer Lloyd Olsen who planned on eating him one evening in September 1948. After the hatchet was dropped and the rooster’s head severed from his body, Mike went through the usual indignant rigmarole of protesting such abuse, flopping about and flapping his wings and the like.