Big Chicken Has The Internet Clucking About Fake News, But Big Chicken Is Real


Fake news comes in all shapes and sizes, and apparently, chickens do too. Big chickens aren’t seen all that often by Twitter users though, and when the chicken is enormously, frighteningly large, the internet gets suspicious. CBS News reports that the big chicken that scared tweeters and sent Twitter ballistic over the weekend was the real thing, but without question it was disturbing — in a big way.

A minute-long video caused a big bother when it “made its way onto Twitter.” Many people thought the big chicken video was made-up fake news and even started using the hashtag #chickenfakenews. Since the moment the as yet unidentified person first tweeted the chicken video, it’s been shared over 35,000 times. What’s the big deal?

The tweet itself isn’t a big deal at all. In all likelihood, it was just a run-of-the-mill poultry yard pic that a Kosovo farmer shared at the end of a hard day with the big bird. Mashable dug up some background on the fowl photo, and reports that there is more than one big chicken involved.

“If you look closely, you’ll see there’s a second, equally terrifying death bird hiding underneath the coop.”

For the poultryman who snapped the shot, Kosovo’s giant chickens are all just part of life, and don’t pose a threat at all. On the other hand, anyone who has ever had to deal directly with chickens knows the beaked biddies can be downright mean. They think nothing of biting the hand that feeds them.

The outlet discovered that the pic was first shared by a local chicken owner, Fitim Sejfijaj, to a chicken Facebook group in Kosovo, which is a “disputed” state in the Balkan Peninsula. BBC writes that “strained relations between its Serb and mainly Albanian inhabitants” continue to make life in Kosovo difficult, especially since its 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. Dealing with big chickens, however hostile the hens may become, is a walk in the park compared to the fraught political situation.

Kosovo Albanians celebrate Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia. [Image by Carsten Koall/Getty Images]

There appear to be a lot of the prodigious poultry in the Kosovo area. The Facebook group is the online place for members of Kosovo’s giant chickens Brahmas Club to gather and share photos, and every one of the pics is as scary — or scarier — than the one that “took Twitter by storm.” It turns out that the famous feathered favorite belongs to the Brahma breed of chickens, and among his own kind, he’s perfectly normal. Brahma birds are “often referred to as the King of All Poultry,” according to KTLA, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the big chickens were “the most in-demand meat breed” in the United States.

While most broilers you buy for dinner weigh less than 4 pounds, the big chicken in the video could tip the scales at 18 pounds. Brahma chickens average 10 to 12 pounds each and are known for their “great size, strength, and vigor.” Next Thanksgiving dinner anyone?

The rooster on Twitter may not be intended for anyone’s dinner just yet. He has a name, Merakli, and when Sejfijaj tweeted the big guy’s pic, he just wanted people to have some fun watching Merakli go about his day. “Enjoy watching Merakli,” he captioned the tweet. Most people would certainly prefer watching Merakli to being the object of Merakli’s interest.

[Featured Image by Leon Neal/Getty Images]

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