I am not a big fan of the IQ test we all took in elementary school. I think I scored pretty well on it, but that bears no resemblance to my day to day performance. I prefer a Real Life Quotient or RLQ as a true indicator of intelligence. You don’t have to sit down to an answer sheet with a number 2 pencil to take it. Periodically in life you are faced with an RLQ test and at the end of it you just know where you fall on the scale without receiving a formal score in the mail.
This past year Frank had an RLQ and sailed right through. I had come to him with a dilemma. Every night a raccoon had been getting into my chicken feed container. I had put bricks on top and the raccoon was undeterred. I had bought a fancy new container with snap up handles designed to lock the top on, but the raccoon had snapped the handles down, thrown the lid off and eaten half my feed before the night was over. I recounted my efforts to Frank and he said, “No problem.” He drove to Kmart, selected the perfect bungee cord and bungeed the snap lock handles together. Now, 6 months later, the raccoon hasn’t had another mouthful of feed and Frank rightly claims to have outsmarted him. I have great respect for a raccoon’s cunning, so I think this gives Frank an extra high RLQ score near to genius.
My most recent test came with chicken husbandry. This summer I was ready to have new chicks added to my 6 chicken flock. I primed the hens with laying mash. I purchased a black rubber nesting bin, filled it with fragrant dried grass and placed it in the corner of the chicken house where the hens were accustomed to laying eggs. I was somewhat surprised when the smallest hen who we had obviously mistakenly named Rooster began to set, but I could smell the success of my flawless preparation. When Rooster had 12 eggs in the nest I marked each with indelible black ink. Each day I lifted Rooster off her eggs and removed any unmarked strays. I did not trust Rooster to do proper egg turning, so I turned them at least twice a day myself. On day 21 I began to listen for little chicks pecking their way out of the eggs, but heard nothing. I was still hopeful on day 28, but the smell at day 35 convinced me all was lost. Rooster seemed relieved when I dumped the eggs, but I recognized failure.
Several weeks later when I was feeding my bevy of 15 Guinea fowl I tallied my true RLQ score. As I called the Guinea fowl up to eat a Guinea hen appeared followed by about 15 fluffy Guinea keets. She had nested in the nearby woods, protected her eggs for almost a month and now had no trouble protecting and feeding these chicks out in the wild woods. This Guinea fowl who has a head smaller than a golf ball and a body the size of a basketball had done in the woods a task that I could not accomplish in my deluxe chicken house. “Maybe,” I thought to myself, “Guineas are really a lot smarter than they look.” But I know it’s not true. As I look at this Guinea standing with 2 feet firmly planted in the water dish to take a drink I know that I have been outmatched by a pea-sized brain. So, there’s Frank up above raccoon and I’m somewhere below Guinea fowl. Take it from me. Don’t start bragging too much about your IQ until you see how you do in real life.
