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