A chicken can run without its head because a neural network in its spine is pre-programmed to control the muscles in frequently-used movements such as running or swimming.
It’s not uncommon for a headless chicken, even one missing its brainstem, to run around for a little while after decapitation. The headless chicken’s muscles can continue to contract for a short while without a brain telling them to do so. Originally Answered: How can a chicken run without its head?
What does it mean to run around like a headless chicken?
Robert Dowling/Corbis Like any person ” running around like a chicken with its head cut off ” a headless chicken does, indeed, run around crazily and without much thought—at first. But if that chicken is Miracle Mike, a chicken that actually spent 18 months without a head, the phrase takes on a new meaning.
Without input from the brain these circuits start spontaneously. “The neurons become active, the legs start moving,” says Dr Tom Smulders of Newcastle University. Usually the chicken is lying down when this happens, but in rare cases, neurons will fire a motor programme of running.
Why can chickens live without their heads?
Part of the reason that a chicken can live without its head has to do with its skeletal anatomy, according to Dr. Wayne J. Kuenzel a poultry physiologist and neurobiologist at the University of Arkansas.
The chicken that lived for 18 months without a head. Seventy years ago, a farmer beheaded a chicken in Colorado, and it refused to die. Mike, as the bird became known, survived for 18 months and became famous. But how did he live without a head for so long, asks Chris Stokel-Walker.
Why do chickens keep moving after their heads are cut off?
But just like humans, they have special fibres called “nerves”, which run like tiny wires all through their body, and some of them end near the surface of the skin. These nerves are what can make a chicken keep moving, even after its head has been chopped off.
What happens to a chicken when it is beheaded?
A beheaded chicken will have muscle spasms that kick the legs, and will flop and seem to ‘run’ but those are just the same motions that occur in any dying body. There was a chicken that was poorly beheaded, and lived for a while. Part of the brain was intact in that case, though, the chicken wasn’t truly without its entire head.