Stages of the Research Process

Stages of the Research Process

July 31, 2017

Tracy Sipma

What we have learned over many years about the avian brain and behavior contradicts hundreds of years of misinformed views about chickens, and other birds. Chickens are not as clueless or “bird-brained” as many people may think they are. They have distinct personalities and can outmaneuver one another. Chickens know their place in the pecking order, and can reason by deduction, which is an ability that humans develop around the age of seven. Recent research into chicken behavior confirms that chickens are far more intelligent and cognitively sophisticated than previously believed. Chickens have a an utterly abysmal status in our society. We treat them like unfeeling and unthinking objects.

Chicken Behavior

“They are perceived as lacking most of the psychological characteristics we recognize in other intelligent animals and are typically thought of as possessing a low level of intelligence compared with other animals,” Marino says. “The very idea of chicken psychology is strange to most people.” (Marino, 2016) Research has shown that chickens have some sense of numbers. Experiments with newly hatched domestic chicks showed they can discriminate between quantities. They also have an idea about ordinality, which refers to the ability to place quantities in a series. A few days old domestic chicks presented with two sets of objects of different quantities disappearing behind two screens were able to successfully track which one hid the larger number by apparently performing simple arithmetic in the form of addition and subtraction. Chickens are also able to remember the trajectory of a hidden ball for a couple of minutes if they see the ball moving and up to one minute if the displacement of the ball is invisible to them. Their performance is similar to that of most primates under similar conditions.

Chickens possess self-control when it comes to holding out for a better food reward. They are able to self-assess their position in the pecking order. These two characteristics are indicative of self-awareness.

Chicken communication is also quite complex, and consists of a large repertoire of different visual displays and at least 24-30 distinct vocalizations. The birds possess the complex ability of referential communication, which involves signals such as calls, displays and whistles to convey information. They can communicate a wide range of information regarding territory, mating, nesting, distress, danger or fear, contentment and food discovery. They may use this to sound the alarm when there is danger, for instance. This ability requires some level of self-awareness and being able to take the perspective of another animal, and is also possessed by highly intelligent and social species, including primates.

Chickens use highly complex forms of “communication using signals that are functionally referential and representational,” a form of communication observed in many primates and some birds, such as ravens and chickadees. One example of this kind of communication is how males entice females with food as a form of courtship that does not immediately lead to mating. This means that females, not only take their time to eavesdrop and evaluate the males’ behavior, but they also must form an opinion about various males — and their reputations for providing food — and then commit these various experiences to memory. Only then does the female express a mating preference. Submissive males in a flock use clever and deceptive strategies to court females while diverting attention away from the dominant male who would otherwise derail their plans. The objective is to outsmart the dominant male by attracting a potential mate away from him without him getting wise to the submissive male’s intentions. This strategy is often successful.

Chickens perceive time intervals and can anticipate future events. Like many other animals, they demonstrate their cognitive complexity when placed in social situations requiring them to solve problems. Chickens are able to experience a range of complex negative and positive emotions, including fear, anticipation and anxiety. They make decisions based on what is best for them. They also possess a simple form of empathy called emotional contagion. Not only do individual chickens have distinct personalities, but mother hens also show a range of individual maternal personality traits which appear to affect the behavior of their chicks. The birds can deceive one another, and they watch and learn from each other. The example of chickens responding to calls indicating the presence of novel food but not so much to food calls about known food. “Thus it now appears that the cognitive processes involved in representational thinking in chickens are similar to those required for associative learning in humans.” (Marino, 2016)

Conclusion

Birds have been shown to be remarkably intelligent in a similar way to mammals such as humans and monkeys. While chickens display feelings comparable to those of humans (such as grief, fear or happiness), they no doubt also possess their own exceptional forms of emotion and consciousness that even the most rigorous scientific tests may not begin to uncover. These perspectives of chickens do not register conceptually or experientially within the human arena. Instead of placing animals according to a simplistic, anthropocentric model of intelligence, we would be more accurate and just in our assessments if we recognized that there are many different measures and kinds of intelligence.

References

Marino, L. (2016) Thinking Chickens: A Literature Review of Cognition, Emotion and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken, Animal Cognition. DOI 10.1007/s10071-016-1064-4