Chickens in Pop Culture

Reading Time: 6 minutes

by Wren Everett

Chicken keepers know when the chickens in pop culture aren’t doing what chickens actually do. Let’s explore some of the bizarre ways chickens are misrepresented and share a chuckle.

Chickens have been a part of history for a long time — thousands of years, in fact. They scratched and pecked the grounds of Roman villas, the streets of ancient Jerusalem, old Egyptian marketplaces, and the humid jungles of their ancestral Indonesian origins. They traveled with the original homesteaders as they moved west, they traveled with the back-to-the-landers as they moved out of the cities, and they occupy modern coops and barnyards throughout the world. They’re a part of every farm-themed playset and every animal-themed coloring book, and have become a symbol of everything rural and rustic.

Things Pop Culture Gets Wrong About Chickens

With all of our millennia of shared history, you’d think that humans would understand chickens near-perfectly by this point. But if you take a look at the way chickens are portrayed in pop culture, you’d see that it’s anything but true. The chickens that appear in animation, video games, and television shows often bear little resemblance to their flesh-and-feather counterparts.

That’s how it goes, though. Just as doctors probably have a hard time watching medical dramas, and police officers probably wince at the sloppy procedures in cop shows, we chicken keepers know when the chickens in our pop culture aren’t doing what chickens actually do. So let’s explore some of the bizarre ways chickens are misrepresented and share a chuckle in solidarity.

Roosters Only Crow at Dawn

It’s early morning, and the eastern sky has begun to lighten. Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” gently fills the air. The farm’s rooster emerges in the pre-dawn light and proudly summits the barn. With a deep breath, he lets loose a clear crow in the tradition of every chanticleer that preceded him — the clarion call that only comes to rouse the rest of the barnyard for a new day.

I imagine folks who don’t keep roosters think that the above paragraph is pretty spot-on. All of us who’ve kept a rooster, however, know that the paragraph above is quite incomplete.

Crowing is a distinctly male activity, and one that’s first triggered by hormonal fluctuations as a rooster reaches sexual maturity. A young rooster may crow at any hour of the night due to the fact that he’s awash in hormones and needs to let off some manly steam. Roosters also crow in response to light — just like all the (somewhat quieter) songbirds do as the sun rises past the horizon. A midnight crow may be in response, therefore, to the bright light of a full moon shining through the coop. Crowing is also used to establish dominance, which is why your rooster may have a crow-off with your neighbor’s rooster, or after anything (real or imagined) has happened that’s ruffled his dignity.

It all boils down to the fact that a rooster might possibly crow at any hour of the day, including, but not limited to, dawn.

Chickens Lay Eggs Lying Down

Every cartoon I’ve ever seen that shows a chicken laying an egg shows the exact same thing — a bird, snugly bedded down in a soft hay nest, quietly resting until an egg just pops from some mysterious portal directly beneath her. Sometimes, the hen even looks surprised at what’s happened.

Some of us may hold this rather inaccurate image of egg-production well into adulthood. The first year I ever kept chickens, I did it as a total novice, having never kept any bird before. Imagine my shock when, for the first time, I actually saw one of my chickens actively laying an egg. And I do mean actively — at the moment of actual egg production, she was standing and straining until the new egg emerged from her vent and fell a considerable few inches to the nesting box below her. Then, after all the effort was expended, she settled back down over the egg. Egg laying may look placid, but that’s because the hen has to prepare for the event and rest afterward.

Chickens Are Out At Night

One of the biggest misunderstandings in video games, movies, and children’s shows is the simple fact that chickens are diurnal. As in, they’re awake during the day and totally shut down at night.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a space-fantasy, such as Destiny 2, or an extremely well-researched historical video game like the 14th-century Bavaria of Kingdom Come or the 1880s Wild West of Red Dead Redemption 2; their chickens are out both day and night. I’ve even seen historical or rural-themed TV shows that used a night filter to make daytime filming appear as if it was night, but forgot to take the chickens off the set! Those Hollywood birds continued scratching and pecking in the bright sunlight of reality, none the wiser that they’d become the mythical “night chicken” in post-production.

It seems that most media producers and developers didn’t grow up with a feathery flock in their own backyards. Because, as anyone who keeps chickens knows, these diurnal birds go to sleep as soon as the sun goes down. They roost, still and quiet, until the sun welcomes them back to wakefulness. At night, chickens are extremely prone to predators for this reason: They basically just turn off (this is good news for any chicken keeper who wants to clip wings, trim rooster spurs, or do any other business to otherwise flighty birds).

Chicks Hatch as Dry, Fluffy Baby Birds

If you’ve seen it once, you’ve probably seen it a hundred times. When a baby bird hatches in a child’s cartoon, the egg cracks, two feet kick out, and then an adorably big-eyed baby bird emerges from the shell (usually wearing some of it as a hat). It’s perfectly dry, fluffy, and ready for adventures.

Birds hatch in one of two ways. Altricial chicks, such as songbirds, hatch underdeveloped and are nest-bound. Ground-dwelling birds, such as chickens, often hatch as precocial chicks and are developed enough that they have a covering of feathers and walk within a day or so of hatching. There’s a family of chicken-like birds known as megapodes that hatch as superprecocial chicks — the most well-developed of any bird species. These chicks hatch from the shell as coordinated, independent chicks with full wing feathers — some species fly on the day they hatch!

No matter how developed they are or aren’t, however, all birds that hatch — including megapodes — emerge from the shell gooey and wet. The inaccuracy in popular culture is understandable — a slimy, newly-hatched bird is anything but fluffy and cute. This “unappealing” dampness, however, is crucial for their survival, as anyone who uses an incubator knows — to dry out in the shell is fatal.

Chickens Are Homicidal!

This one’s a weird one, but surprisingly ubiquitous in video games as a joke. While the thought of a seemingly innocuous bird soundly trouncing a full-grown man in a fight is a funny image, I imagine the joke’s consistency is a homage to the iconic “cucco” of the Legend of Zelda franchise. In the Zelda series, these Leghorn-like chickens seem harmless enough, but if you were to be so foolish as to strike one with your sword, you’d suddenly and inescapably become the recipient of an unrelentingly deadly avian attack.

I’ve seen chickens with murderous tendencies show up in the Assassin’s Creed series, in the Yakuza series, Wasteland 2, and several Pokémon-type games, where they appear as a preposterously pugilistic ally to fight alongside the player character.

Now, everyone may know a story about a rooster with a bad temper, but when it comes to human-chicken relations, the situation is usually pretty amicable. As prey animals, a chicken is far more likely to run away from harm than step into it. Their fighting nature is most often turned against their own kind.

Reality Gets It Right

Though our culture’s collective media might have a warped view of our favorite birds, we can form our own opinions from our own feathery friends in our own flocks. There, our day-loving birds faithfully crow through the day or faithfully lay eggs, hatch from those eggs, and don’t harbor a murderous thought in their little minds toward their keepers (with the exception of some roosters). Thankfully, those who actually keep chickens don’t have to use pop culture to understand them.

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Wren Everett and her husband quit their teaching jobs in the city and moved back to thae land on 12 acres in the Ozarks. There, they’re learning to live as modern peasants: off-grid, as self-sufficient as possible, and quite happily.

Originally published in the June/July 2026 issue of Backyard Poultry and regularly vetted for accuracy.