Wait, what? Twenty years of wondering and controversy and you didn’t even test it? It seems to me that you are rather interested in a good argument than a good answer :)
If I were to test this I would look at two things:
1. Can you teach chickens anything at all? (You want to explore the teachability of chickens first – if chickens drown in the second step and you find out that you can’t actually teach chickens anything meaningful you can already be pretty confident that teaching chickens to swim is impossible.)
2. How do “default” chickens behave when thrown into water?
2b. (If chickens drown when thrown into water:) How would you have to change their behavior if you wanted them to keep afloat? Is such a change within the scope of chickens’ teachability?
Seems like perfectly reasonable, straightforward testing to me. Something the Mythbusters could (should, actually!) do.
I don't have a spare chicken, so I'm not totally sure, but I think chickens would float quite well. And their default flap wings to run faster behavior would also do pretty well to get them moving in water.
I have literally typed 4 replies to ugh, deleting them before I posted them and then coming back to this page.
I refuse to start this again. 20 years! I will say that there are a lot of problems here, including type of chicken, time of year, and whether the chicken is in fear of it's life or if it knows you're just playing around. I think you'd have the same problem with giraffes.
EDIT: It's also in the feathers. Chickens aren't ducks, so their feathers are made differently. Proponents of non-swimming chickens point to the lack of webbed feet, quality of the feathers, and absence of any aquatic chicken relatives.
You should, of course, rescue the chicken if it can’t swim. That’s not as wasteful and you can test different methods of getting the chicken into water.
– edit: More floating than swimming. Now you start having the really stupid arguments: Is putting a chicken into water and letting it just float there the same as teaching a chicken how to swim? Ah, semantics. Bane of humanity.
I'm sure you're referring to the famous UncleFroggy swimming YouTube chicken. I've seen the video, but many questions remain.
Was this a stunt chicken?
Was there a chicken flotation device used?
How many other chickens drowned before this one swam? Sure, we have the comments from the guy who shot the video, but how reliable is a man who throws chickens into his swimming pool and video tapes them? A guy that would do that would do about anything, including faking a video. I notice that there are several times that the chicken looks directly at the camera, and you'll notice that the chicken never clucks while he is talking.
Is there an assurance that this chicken wasn't trained before the video?
:)
(To answer the original comment, yes, the arguing is much more fun than the result)
Next up, differences between chickens and giraffes when viscosity is varied. Would a chicken in molasses do better than a giraffe? I think the answer is obvious
If I were to test this I would look at two things:
1. Can you teach chickens anything at all? (You want to explore the teachability of chickens first – if chickens drown in the second step and you find out that you can’t actually teach chickens anything meaningful you can already be pretty confident that teaching chickens to swim is impossible.)
2. How do “default” chickens behave when thrown into water?
2b. (If chickens drown when thrown into water:) How would you have to change their behavior if you wanted them to keep afloat? Is such a change within the scope of chickens’ teachability?
Seems like perfectly reasonable, straightforward testing to me. Something the Mythbusters could (should, actually!) do.