Chicken on a String

I was cruising through youtube videos the other day looking for more variations on the chicken dance.  I was reminded of the story of Nasruddin in the market.  He sees a bag of potatoes, and picks one up, bites into it, howls in pain.  He has broken a tooth on what was a rock, not a potato.  He reaches in to the bag again, takes another, and bites into it, howls in pain, drops the rock a second time.  After repeating this, the bemused passerby asks " Why do you keep doing that?"
"I was hoping to find a good one".  says Nasruddin.
There are many videos of the Chicken Dance, done many ways, and most of them are just annoying.  Some are silly enough, but I guess the thing is, it is still the Chicken Dance, no matter how you film it.
My chickens are considerably more graceful and charming than any human   pretending to be a chicken - you will never see a chicken pretending to be a human - and then of course there's the surreal world of Lawrence Welk.
Amid this video search came up other topics, I liked the chickens breaking up an argument between rabbits - see "Chicken Police", I liked the two young men playing banjo and fiddle while chickens roamed around in time but there were plenty of disturbing things out there too.
I have seen people with pet chickens who are accustomed to a gentle leash designed to restrain but not hurt them, but there was some guy out there, who so reminded me of some of the creepier guys I've known who had his chicken on a string and jerked her around in a way that he seemed to think was funny and cute.  The hen didn't care for it.  She gave up struggling soon, and acted in a way that I could only describe as sad and hopeless.  She kept trying to make herself small and invisible, and he kept yanking the string.  I didn't watch all of it, but I felt very church-lady-ish as I left my opinion on the site.  I was at least hopeful to see that in the dislikes/likes category, the dislikes far outweighed the likes.
Another was a man who decided his chicken should learn how to swim in the pool and was surprised to find that the chicken caught pneumonia and died a week or so later.  He responded to people's suggestions that there was a connection between throwing a chicken in a pool and a fatal respiratory infection with surprise and confusion.
We as a culture raise animals by the millions in conditions we don't want to know about, slaughter them as though they were weeds and ship them off into a soulless food distribution machine by the ton.
We treat our companion animals with more care than we treat our children.
Is anyone surprised that with such distortions the world is in trouble?
I have entered this sharing space with chickens world with unconscionable unconsciousness.  I can tell myself I'm doing my best, but time will tell.  Aside from books and serendipity, there's not much information out there about chicken welfare.  Cows we get.  Cows are mammals.  Chickens are an alien species, not like us, but if you spend any time around them, you can see they are very much like us.  They have social relationships, needs for comfort, safety and sustenance.  They are curious and oddly trusting.  Buck has been here for only 4 months, and in that time has gone from being a really aggressive rooster to more of a pacifist.  All it took was safety and the chicken equivalent of cookies.