"You are getting verrry sleepy..." Thanks for spilling the beans, Art...:-) To tell the truth, I don't remember how I learned to hypnotize chickens. I started out hypnotizing pigeons and it became an obsession with me. When I was a kid, I raised pigeons... basic crappola type for starters, which we'd catch, shimmying out on barn rafters at night, and then graduating into racing pigeons when I got older. Somewhere along the line, I learned how to hypnotize them. What you do is hold them on the ground on their back with one hand, and then slowly wave a feather or a stick (A wand would be more professional) back and forth in front of their eye (about three inches away at a seventeen degree angle:-). (Birds have their eyes on the side of their head, and don't have peripheral vision, like we do..) The bird will watch the feather with the eye that's facing up from the ground and become mesmerized. Then, you can slowly remove the other hand that is holding the pigeon down as you continue slowly waving the feather. Finally, you can stop waving the feather and move that hand away slowly, and the pigeon will lie on its back for a couple of minutes, completely motionless.

In MY real life, I worked at a Museum that had a working farm.One day when I was teaching a class of nine and ten year old kids, this rooster came walking into the classroom. On a whim, I picked him up and told the kids that I was going to hypnotize him. I went through my whole routine, embellishing it with a lot of wise cracks "When you wake up, you will be a dog.." etc. I think that I hypnotized the kids in the process. After that, that darned rooster would come wandering in to class almost every day to get hypnotized. When I became Director of the Museum, I didn't have much use for chicken hypnotizing, but many years later someone remembered(as Art has)that I used to hypnotize chickens. So, as a special treat on the last day of summer classes, it was anounced that the great Rasmussoni would personally hypnotize a chicken. All the kids at the farm came, and most of the staff, and I was nervous that maybe I'd lost my touch. A volunteer chicken was taken out of the coop and brought into the classroom, the room fell to a hush, and I did my act. With great success. Then, after that, it became an annual event.

If you ever need a chicken hypnotized, I am your man. My wife and I go to a nearby farm that has an ice cream stand that has the world's largest rooster strutting around and intimidating the customers. Maybe I should tell the folks that run it that I'll hypnotize their rooster, free, as a publicity stunt. I can see it now. Better have my wife iron my cape...:-)

The Great Rasmussoni