The fable known in America as Chicken Little, and in Britain as Chicken Licken or Henny Penny, has comprised a portion of the repository of oral tradition for perhaps 25 centuries, only emerging as text in the West after the Grimm Brothers rendered such transcriptions fashionable. Its portrayal of violent death as a result of paranoia leading to mass hysteria was one of many similar cautionary tales extant since the inception of advanced civilization. In our modern era this lesson has been inverted, with acolytes of conspiracy theories now comprising a plurality of the populace. Rather than being subsumed, however, CL now elucidates post-modern human mis-interpretation of the natural world.

The metaphorical nature of the tale, in which the avians are proxy for credulous, panicky humans exhibiting clearly avoidable foibles, has evolved to a literal interpretation: domestic prey animals lack cognitive ability (are dumb), while predators achieve their goals using aggression and subterfuge (are smart). Though most humans apprehend, at least vaguely, that animals neither speak human languages nor bow to a king, the perversities of the simpler interpretation permeate our culture, leading to the ubiquitous beliefs that 1) domestic and even wild prey animals are simple, dismissible, and eatable; and 2) predators are intelligent, opportunistic, and capitalistic.

Corroboration of the pervasiveness of these beliefs throughout Western culture abounds. A frightened person is chicken while a sexy one is a fox. Ruthless skulduggery inspires responses ranging from fascination to emulation. Taking the time to parse a perceived slight leads to anonymity, while killing and eating the offender goes viral. Virality is what all people seek, as espoused in aphorisms such as There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

That these beliefs are specious is manifestly demonstrable. Domesticated birds allowed even a modicum of freedom demonstrate problem-solving aptitude, and populations of escaped domestics, such as chickens in Kaua’i, readily thrive in the wild. Wild populations of predators and prey, such as rabbits and foxes, maintain stable populations over time barring ecosystem disruption. Predator animals struggle more to find food than do prey animals, and both predators and prey are more successful in cooperating groups. Yet while calmly evaluating evidence is the implied moral of the original, the literal interpretation urges us to catapult to imaginary nostrums.

Like CL, we prefer our own fantasies to observable evidence.