Chickens obsess you.

Chickens in some forms – roasted, for example – are perfectly acceptable to me, but look into their eyes while they are alive and bear witness to genuine, bottomless stupidity. They are the most horrifying and nightmarish creatures in this world. During production on Even Dwarfs Started Small I watched a group of chickens trying to cannibalise a one-legged comrade, and in Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser I show audiences how to hypnotise them, which is ridiculously easy. Hold the bird to the ground and using a piece of chalk draw a straight line away from its head. Do that and they don’t budge an inch. You can also draw a circle around the animal and it will run in a loop until it drops from exhaustion.

Many years ago I became fascinated by a rooster named Weirdo, who weighed over thirty pounds. His offspring, Ralph, was even bigger. The man who had raised these extremely aggressive animals had been forced to singe off their spurs with a blowtorch. Then I found Frank, a miniature horse, specially bred from sixteenth-century Spanish stock, who stood less than two feet high. I told Frank’s owner I wanted to film Ralph chasing Frank – with the tiniest midget riding him – around the biggest sequoia tree in the world, more than a hundred feet in circumference. It would have looked extraordinary because horse and rider together were still smaller than Ralph the rooster. Unfortunately Frank’s owner refused. “My horse isn’t going to show up for that,” he said. “It will make him look stupid.”

-Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed

I came here for the pun but the actual best price I could find offhand was $2.37 per liter.