I recently commended dogs and dandelions for being non-racist. Observant readers might’ve noticed I did not mention birds. Birds, who have been on earth maybe 160 million years longer than humans, are notorious racists. While humans may say nasty things about people of different colors and creeds, certain birds have evolved to eat other birds, which I think is racism gone wild.
A friend once gave me 50 chicken eggs to hatch in my incubator. The eggs came from at least a dozen varieties of birds, and when they hatched, I had chicks of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Within a week these chicks were automatically aligning themselves with birds of their own variety. Barred rocks hung out only with barred rocks; golden comets preferred the company of other golden comets. I had two araconas and three australorps, and even though all five birds were entirely black, they wouldn’t be caught dead together. The araconas suspiciously eyed the australorps and vice versa.
I do not know how to explain this instinctive flocking together. After all, the chicks had no mirrors–how did they even know what kind of bird they were? Moreover, the differences between chicken varieties are strictly superficial–they can all interbreed just fine. So why did they segregate themselves according to appearance? Do all creatures have a natural preference for their own kind, even if they can’t be sure what their own kind is?
Maybe. But even if these little dinosaurs suggest racism is innate, they also offer hope it can be overcome. My turkey hen just spent a month sitting on a nest containing both turkey and chicken eggs. The turkey eggs were duds, thanks to the extreme age of her turkey husband, but five of the chicken eggs hatched just fine, and those chicks are being well-tended by their doting turkey mother. When I tried to get a look at the happy family, the father turkey chased me away, looking young again in the throes of proud papa-hood.
The moral of this story seems to be that some of the oldest racists on earth can overcome their prejudices if they have adequate motivation. So maybe there’s hope for us newcomer humans after all.
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