Owen Walsh
Popular culture has made “bird-brained” into an insult implying a lack of intelligence. But years of research has found that birds, including chickens, are much smarter than once believed.
Chickens are a very mistreated, misunderstood animal. Around eight billion individual chickens are consumed every year in the United States, and the egg industry exploits hundreds of millions more.
Worse yet, 99.9% of chickens raised for meat suffer inhumane conditions on factory farms, confined to spaces too small to even stand or spread their wings. The agricultural industry treats these creatures as though they were inanimate commodities—not the complex, intelligent, and emotional animals they actually are.
Just a quick glance at the latest scientific research, however, proves just how far chickens truly are from inanimate. These are birds that understand the world around them, develop individual personalities, remember what they’ve gone through, and experience strong feelings what happens to them.
Are chickens smart?
Yes, chickens are smart, and smarter than you might think! In recent years, researchers have made some important strides in realizing the cognitive capabilities of chickens, like their ability to recall and learn from past events, dream, empathize with others, and even do math!
Chickens can be manipulative
Chickens are socially complex animals with a “remarkably sophisticated system” for communicating with one another. Even more remarkably, sometimes chickens use their skills to deceive.
In a wide-ranging review on the intelligence of chickens, neuroscientist and animal behavior expert Dr. Lori Marino writes that roosters have been observed making a “food call” even when there’s no food around. By making this distinctive noise, they attract the attention of hens who come expecting a meal, and instead find only a deceptive male who’s played a trick on them. Marino also notes that females eventually develop counter-strategies and stop responding to males who misuse the food call too often.
Chickens show self-awareness
Self-awareness can be defined as knowledge or comprehension of one’s own identity. Others refer to it as a “sense of I” that mentally separates an individual from others.
Scientists point to two abilities that best indicate chickens’ self-awareness: self-control and self-assessment.
Chickens have demonstrated that they’re able to resist temptation in order to receive a better reward later. One experiment presented hens with two choices: 1) waiting out a two-second interval and receiving a small food reward, 2) waiting out a six-second interval and receiving a larger food reward. The majority of hens had the self-control to choose the longer wait for a more generous treat in return.
Another indicator of self-awareness is the ability to evaluate one’s own social standing within a group. A 1996 study found that chickens in a group observe the way that others are behaving, figure out the social hierarchy, understand where they fit in, and act accordingly. It’s just like the natural pecking orders that arise in a pack of wolves, a troop of monkeys, or a group of humans in the workplace.
Chickens can dream
Similar to humans and other mammals, when chickens fall into a deep sleep, they experience rapid eye movement, or REM. During the REM stage, our eyes dart around in different directions, our brains temporarily paralyze our bodies’ muscles to keep us still, and we have dreams. Chickens go through the same process.
Researchers aren’t sure what chickens’ dreams consist of—however, it’s a safe bet that past events and the emotions associated with those events inform what a snoozing hen or rooster might be dreaming about. Like humans, their dreams could be about pleasant things like flying, playing with others, or finding a safe place to roost. If they’ve experienced trauma, like the horrors seen on factory farms, it’s likely that they’ll have nightmares.
Chickens display good memory
Chickens have very good memories, particularly with faces. Chickens can recognize up to 30 other individual chickens and imprint the image of their mother within three days of hatching. Interestingly, their facial recognition abilities extend beyond their own species: young chicks are also quick to learn and later recognize human faces. When researchers in 2015 familiarized newly hatched chicks with a virtual human face, the chicks responded very sensitively to shifting features, like when the face’s age or gender characteristics were altered.
When put to the test, chickens have also consistently proven their adeptness at remembering past experiences and making decisions based on these memories. Scientists studied the “episodic memories” of both young chicks and adult hens by presenting them with two different kinds of food. The one food type was “devalued” because it had been fed to the chickens prior to the experiment. Thus, when later presented with the old food and a new meal, the chickens consistently showed a preference for the newer, more valuable food. They remembered what they learned, and made choices based on those memories.
Chickens have problem-solving skills
Philosophers used to believe that the ability to employ logic to think through a problem is what separated humans from animals. Modern animal psychology calls this theory into question, however, as scientists have observed many species of mammals and birds demonstrating the ability to use logic to their advantage.
Chickens have problem-solving skills known by psychologists as “logical reasoning” or “transitive inference.” These skills allow creatures to understand information without it ever getting explicitly said. For example, if we know that John’s house is bigger than Taylor’s house, and we also know that John’s house is smaller than Mary’s house, then we can use logic to deduce that Mary’s house is bigger than Taylor’s house.
Chickens have been found to employ similar logic in social experiments. One study found that when a group of chickens witness the most dominant member of their flock get physically bested by an unknown bird, they intuitively know not to challenge this unknown member themselves.
“Their actions indicated they understood that if this stranger can defeat someone who can defeat them, then they are not going to defeat that stranger,” Dr. Marino writes. “These results, altogether, indicate that hens can gain useful information about their status in the dominance hierarchy before actually engaging another hen.”
Chickens can do math
Believe it or not, studies show that chickens can do basic arithmetic! Psychologists at the University of Padova in Italy published a research study in 2014 which found that newborn chicks demonstrated the ability to count in small increments.
Researchers placed five pieces of food behind two different screens—three pieces of food behind one screen, two pieces of food behind the other. When allowed to go retrieve the food, the little chicks consistently chose the screen with three rewards over two. This showed that the chicks understood the difference between “less” and “more.” But then the researchers went further by challenging the chicks to perform some basic equations.
For example, they’d start out by placing four pieces of food behind the right screen, and just one piece behind the left. Before allowing the chicks to retrieve their reward, the researchers moved two pieces from the right and placed it behind the left. The chicks watched this, and when set free would consistently walk to the left screen. In other words, they were able to perform the following calculations: 4-2=2, while 1+2=3.
Do chickens have feelings?
Chickens experience a wide range of feelings and emotions. In fact, the emotions chickens feel are integral to many of the abilities discussed above, playing a central role in how they “learn, remember, and think,” according to The Someone Project.
Unfortunately, this means that a chicken trapped on a factory farm is keenly aware of her situation. She suffers through all the same negative emotions as any human would in the same situation.
Chickens feel empathy
Chickens are empathetic animals. Not only do they have their own feelings, but they can recognize and share in the feelings of other chickens. One study from 2011 measured the emotional responses of mother hens when their chicks were in distress compared to when the chicks were at ease.
The researchers found that when the chicks were distressed, mother hens’ heart rates increased, they became more alert, stopped preening themselves, and had a reduction in eye temperature. All signs of anxiety, as a result of their chicks’ own stress levels.
How smart are chickens compared to other animals?
Chickens are much smarter than we’ve historically given them credit for. But how does their intelligence rank compared to other animals? In her review, Dr. Marino concludes that “chickens are just as cognitively, emotionally and socially complex as most other birds and mammals in many areas.”
Chickens even outsmart humans at an early age. The self-control chickens display is not found in children until around the age of four. And the fact that chickens can make logical inferences is also most impressive, especially considering the fact that children do not have the capacity for this sort of thinking until at least the age of seven.
Chickens are smart, so why eat them?
Particularly in the U.S., the consumption of poultry and eggs is so common, it can be hard not to associate chickens with food. But years of research makes it abundantly clear. We are long overdue to rethink our understanding and treatment of these sensitive birds.
With all we know about the social, emotional, and intelligent minds of chickens, there is no excuse for the way they get treated on factory farms. They can feel pain; they can feel fear; they can suffer. And when kindly and given space to live freely, they can also feel positive emotions like excitement, comfort, and joy.
Luckily, there’s an easy first step to take in treating chickens with the respect and humanity they deserve: Leave them off your plates.
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