Evildoers or Opportunists?

While I was out of town on vacation the chickens executed a jailbreak. They got into the part of the back yard that I have banned them from this year. By the time the escape was discovered they had uprooted a couple of yellow squash plants and some small onions and they had strewn a lot of dirt and mulch over the paths. This is their particular speciality, they are adept at spreading everything in their immediate environment into one even layer. This way they can pick and peck through everything very thoroughly.

But now that I think about it, I wonder if they deliberately chose the squash.

Like many gardeners I usually end up with an over abundance of squash and zucchini. And like most gardeners with this problem I run out of victims on whom to pawn it off long before I run out of squash. So I end up giving lots of it to the hens. They seem to like it, especially the seeds. But maybe they are more like us than we imagine. Maybe it is part of their dastardly plan to eradicate zucchini when they have the opportunity so they won't have to do the heavy lifting of disposing of the excess squash.