Quote: Most chickens don't have anything significant there but some have a variety of additions. Sometimes that bone tip is sheathed by keratin spurs or claws. They can flog with that too. The vagaries of genetics, as usual.
Quote: True; however I would just like to add, for the nasty-rooster owner's benefit, that from my experience, it doesn't matter how tall you are. I am fairly tall, well over five foot, and have had a cockerel leap from a standstill all the way up to my face; no run up, did not flap his wings once to get up there, and I am sure that if I was over six foot tall he could have also reached my face without trouble. Only my automatic reflex saved my eyes as he attacked from behind and slightly to the side, as most of them do. Just suddenly and silently appeared right over my shoulder coming at my eyes. I backhanded him away, more of a twitch/flinch reaction than a deliberate blow, and he fluttered down only to spring back up instantly at my face, again without a single flap of the wings. He was not at his adult strength or size, had never been abused, was hand reared and socialized and so forth; he just came from nasty stock kept and bred by a person who tolerated her pet chihuahua biting her children. That alone should have been a warning to me.
Another of my cockerels, a bantam mix with unremarkable (normal) wings, has leaped from a standstill when frightened and flown almost vertically up for about 100 feet before flying horizontally for over a kilometer. Not all chickens are as earthbound and flightless as some people think; if I had a dollar for every time I hear "well, he's only tiny so he can only get my ankles so I don't mind"... In that case the only reason he goes for the ankles is choice, not lack of ability to go for the face, and a decent rooster spur in the tendon has crippled many an adult for life, never mind a defenseless child.
