Chicken Poo B-i-n-g-o

Since my garden is awaiting the Raised Bed Fairy to come in the middle of the night and leave behind beautiful hand-crafted raised beds for me to plant our fall crop, I've decided to focus on chickens this week because I am not waiting for any kind of chicken fairy to magically appear.

This blog entry is not for the overly-polite readers. You've gotta be okay with exploring a little bit of the crass underbelly of the chicken world. We're not talking cock-fighting. We're talking chicken sh*t b-i-n-g-o.

Really.


Oddly enough I heard about this on Time magazine's website. I found a delightful little video showing how chicken sh*t b-i-n-g-o works, complete with interviews of the founders of this wonderful event. If you decide to watch the video, be prepared to hear the phrase "chicken sh*t" repeatedly, so don't watch it at work or in front of the kids or with grandma.

Click here to watch the video on Time.com

A group of people betting on which square a chicken will poo on is something you have to see to fully appreciate.

I am not new to the world of animal defecation gambling. When I was in college a popular event was Moo Poo B-i-n-g-o. The student association roped off an enormous square of grass on campus and used chalk (like the kind to spray-paint white lines on a ball field) to mark out a checkerboard pattern on the grass. Each square was numbered and a crude fence of tape and wooden 1x2 posts was placed around the edge of the field.

Students could buy a square for a small sum of money - about $2-$5, I think. The proceeds all went to some worthy charity. Us college students sat around the large grass checkerboard and cheered when a big-bellied dairy cow was led onto the grass. An old guy in overalls had the cow on a rope leash and was walking her back and forth across all the squares so each person got an equal chance of winning.

When the cow stopped, we all gasped. When the cow peed, we all prematurely started to cheer and then let out a huge "Awwwwwww……" of disappointment.

Finally, after an eternity, the cow pooped. The poop splattered into two squares, but the rules stated that the initial point of impact was the winner. Some lucky kid jumped up and grabbed his prize - it was about $100 I think - a small fortune when you're in college. The several hundred dollars from our entry fees went to a charity and the field was cleared for the following day's event.

It really is an awesome way to raise money for a charity. Back then I used to work for the college newspaper and I did a story on the event. I recall asking the organizers why they picked a cow as the animal of choice. The answer was simple: Cows are big, generally calm, and poop a lot, And you need an animal who's guaranteed to poop to make it successful. An animal that has one large dollop of poo is much better than an animal that walks and leaves a trail of small poo, such as a goat.

I suppose chicken sh*t b-i-n-g-o is just a smaller scale version of the same thing. Maybe "poultry poo b-i-n-g-o" would be more socially acceptable, but likely less popular in that biker bar shown on the Time website's video.

Aren't you glad I brought all this to your attention? I'm sure my mom is very proud of what I learned in college after reading this.

(NOTE: I had to change all the "b" words to b-i-n-g-o with dashes the hopes of avoiding a horrible spammer who has commented about 5 times a day for about 6 months now with b-i-n-g-o website links. I'm hoping by cutting out the "b" word in my post that this spammer might give up on this post since I'm sure it's just an automated robot scanning blogs for the "b" word and then writing the same comment with links to "b" websites. My next step is to delete the photo since it's saved with a "b" word that the spammer could pick up on. I'm so sick of these daily spammer comments that I'll delete this post if they don't go away.)