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In April 2019, a video supposedly showing a chicken being hypnotized went viral on social media: This is a genuine, unaltered video of a chicken reacting to a line being drawn in the sand directly in front of it. However, while this practice is often described as hypnosis, Dimitrios Beredimas, an agronomist and blogger at Strange Animals, noted that it would be more accurate to say that this chicken is in a state of tonic immobility. This video appears to have originated on the Insane Monkey YouTube page. That version was accompanied by the following description: While many people may be seeing this chicken hypnotism video for the first time, this behavior has been acknowledged since at least 1648, when it was mentioned in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow) by Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit scholar: So what's happening here? The video shows a chicken entering a catatonic-type state after experiencing a fear-potentiated response to a line drawn in the sand. This animal behavior is called 'tonic immobility, but readers may be more familiar with the colloquial terms playing dead or playing possum. While this is typically a defensive mechanism, Beredimas notes that the chicken isn't particularly good at pretending to be dead: Since this phenomenon may be new to city folk, let's take a look at a few other videos showcasing this technique: If you have access to a chicken and want to try this, the Strange Animals blog provided the following instructions: This isn't the only way to hypnotize a chicken. Other methods include swirling your finger in a circle around the birds head or tucking its head underneath its wing. The latter method was briefly mentioned in Ernest Hemingway's posthumous 1985 book, The Dangerous Summer: While Hemingway may be taking some artistic license with his an hour or more sentence, and although this trick isn't guaranteed to work on all breeds of chicken, the above-displayed viral video showcases a technique to hypnotize chickens that has been used for centuries.
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