(But only because I’m trying to understand.) I really appreciate the input from people who commented on my Dimorphism post. It helped me open my thinking a bit. Thanks.
Sapolsky keeps coming up, and I’d love to read Behave, but it’s 800 pages! and I have a stack of others I have a more immediate need to read. So I'd appreciate any insights.

I've kept chickens for a dozen years or so. Behaviors vary among varieties and within varieties. Here, I'm talking about Old English bantams; I suspect they're closer to the original Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus) ancestor than other domesticated birds, which are bred to be passive meat and egg machines. The bantams, on the other hand, are feisty. The males will cut you every chance they get, for no apparent reason. You come into their space, they cut you. You clean their coop, they cut you. You feed them, they cut you. Bring them fresh veggies for treats, they cut you.

The females don't do that. Most females don't have spurs to cut you with, although occasionally you'll find a hen with spurs. But no hen has ever shown aggressive behavior to me, equipped or not.

I can hear the "but humans aren't chickens" comments aiming for the keyboards already. I know. But humans are animals, and were created by the same mechanisms that created chickens. We even share 60% of our DNA. Yikes! That's over HALF! So let's look at the other side of the story.

Conspicuously reminiscent of humans, chickens, even within a single breed, have a wide range of personalities. Some are clearly more intelligent than others. Some of the males are less aggressive. Some are downright affectionate. One such case was a little rooster named Harland. While most of the guys were totally indiscriminate in their sexual habits, Harland was a pair-bonder. He picked the most intelligent female -- or more likely she picked him -- and they slept side by side on the roost every night.

When any of the other roosters would find a bug to eat they would gobble it down and go on searching for the next one. When Harland found a bug he would hold it high in the air, and emit a particular vocalization unlike any of the other sounds in his vocabulary. Whether two feet or forty feet away, Claudia would hear the call and come running. Harland would place the snack on the ground and Claudia would eat it.

This was not a one-time event that I anthropomorphized into a sentimental interpretation. This was regular behavior that I viewed from many angles. He was collecting food and giving it to his mate. None of the other roosters did that. When I would approach him, instead of leaving a bloody stripe on my ankle he would fly up and sit on top of my head. We played games where I would toss him up in the air and catch him. He loved it, and begged for more. We learned bits of each other's language. He was very relational with humans.

Why weren't all the roosters like Harland? Was something wrong with their culture? Who taught them their culture? I bought them all from a hatchery in Texas, and they were sent through the mail in a shoebox on the first day of their lives. They had no one to teach them chicken lore, but they sure knew what to do with a switchblade. And where did Harland learn his manners? Are human behaviors really so much more under our control, or do we just like to crow about it?