um...yeah. I get that chickens don't fly any longer, but if birds didn't have this, we'd have to pick them up off the ground all the time.

I'd venture that their reaction times and hearing are infinitely better than ours as well.

They also taste delicious with the Colonel's secret blend of 11 herbs and spices.

It's the Eye of a Chicken
It's the Thrill of the Flight
Rising Up to the Challenge of our Raptors

Makes you wonder what Big Bird sees.

From what I remember, most birds don't have especially acute hearing, with some exceptions, like owls. Most rely heavily on sight. A lot of birds, not just chickens, appear to have four or five types of cones ("colour" receptors) in their retinas, as opposed to our three. (Goldfish, interestingly, also appear to have four types of cones.)

Some birds appear to be able to see the polarization as well as the wavelength (colour) of light, so their visual world has a whole other dimension that ours doesn't. This probably has to do with the challenges of nagivating in a 3D environment while flying, as well as spotting food from a distance. Many birds also have distance vision far more acute than ours.

So, yeah, being able to see the world the way a bird sees it would be pretty damn cool.

http://vimeo.com/9880377

I was watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and was thinking this.

The man-apes touch the obelisk and that makes them carnivores (sorry vegans, but it's a sign of intelligent life) and they kill some tasty boar with a leg bone. (The one that transforms into a spaceship in the most famous visual segue in history.)

How come when you don't cook burgers you get e.Coli, but every carnivore kills and eats its food raw...even several hours after the kill?

Some women have four types of cones. There are two forms of the red receptor gene, with slightly different wavelength excitation peaks, encoded on the X chromosome, so women with 2 different alleles can see and distinguish a wider range of reds than men can (since men have only 1 X chromosome).

"If only I could see what you see with your eyes!"

I immediately started singing Cabaret...

The ancestors of mammals were small nocturnal creatures who spent most of their days in burrows and lost a lot of their ability to see colors. Only humans and a few apes can see the red-orange spectrum, having evolved the ability to pick out ripe fruit. Birds never lost it, which is why cardinals can be red without fearing cats, and hunters can stalk deer in day glo orange vests.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Colonel Sanders.
I've seen C Beams glitter in the darkness by the hen house gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to fry." Roy Batty - Rhode Island Red

Nothing a little gene splicing won't fix.