A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbour. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

What a tragedy. Born to soar into the heavens, but conditioned to stay earthbound he spent his entire life pecking at stray seeds and chasing insects. Though destined to be among the most awesome of all fowl, he believed his neighbour’s counsel and never understood that he could have joined those majestic birds in the sky.

What are chickens like? Chickens are crowd followers. If a chicken sees a bunch of chickens running across the chicken yard, he will take off after them. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know where they are going or why they are going there. He follows along because he doesn’t want to miss out on anything the majority is doing. Chickens just naturally “squabble and fight” over things in the chicken yard. If one finds a nice juicy bug to eat, suddenly they all want it. They will chase each other all over the chicken yard, trying to take it away from each other. They are funny that way. They can walk all around a bug or a grasshopper and not pay any attention to it, but the moment one decides he wants it, at that moment, they all decide they want it and the chase is on. They are content to live in the chicken yard, walking around with their eyes on the ground, scratching in the dirt looking for something to eat. Most