CASINO DRAW: An Arkansas-trained chicken.

  • CASINO DRAW: An Arkansas-trained chicken.

Here’s an Arkansas delight:

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The New York Times wanders in a story about the return of a Chinatown Fair in New York to the absence of the fair’s tick-tack-toe-playing chicken.

From there, the amazing chicken turns up in a New York casino.

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And before the story is over, we meet Bunky Boger, 82, of Lowell, a trainer of tick-tack-toe chickens.

The attraction to this game?

“Don’t you think you’re smarter than a chicken?” Mr. Boger, 82, said by telephone from his farm in Arkansas. “Most people think they’ll just head him off, and the chicken will come around and beat them, and they just can’t believe it.”

Boger, a former rodeo clown, says he can make $4,000 a week leasing chickens to casinos.

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From Boger, the reporter soon traveled, of course, to Hot Springs.

Mr. Boger got his start from Bob Bailey, an animal trainer and zoologist. Mr. Bailey and his wife, Marian, a psychologist, ran a company called Animal Behavior Enterprises, and something they called the IQ Zoo. They had a dancing chicken, a postcard-vending chicken, a piano-playing duck that performed “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” and a drum-playing rabbit. After his wife died, Mr. Bailey gave some chickens and housing units to Mr. Boger. He also donated a mock-up to the Smithsonian, he said.

The tick-tack-toe chickens, Mr. Bailey said from his lakeside home in Hot Springs, Ark., are “not mental giants.”

“But they are certainly a lot brighter than most people will give them credit for,” he added.

Details show the chicken wrangling business is complicated and expensive. Boger is working on a chicken that deals blackjack.

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NOTE TO COPY EDITORS: I know. Most people spell it “tic tac.” The NY Times doesn’t. I stuck with their spelling since it was their story.

UPDATE: Good background supplied late this afternoon by Art Gillaspy at UCA on the Arkansas originators of chicken training. Read on:

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