Chickens can be Machiavellian, study finds

Most backyard chicken owners think of their hens as pets. Stefanya D’Alessandro says their chickens, dog and cat often hang out in the yard together. David Quick/Staff

Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck — that bug-eyed chicken in the neighbor’s pen is isn’t just scratching around. It’s sizing you up.

A study just released suggests the poultry “are behaviorally sophisticated, discriminating among individuals, exhibiting Machiavellian-like social interactions.” In other words, they can be just as sneaky as any higher order primate about getting their way.

They “share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphin and even humans,” said Lori Marino, of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, who did the study published in the scientific journal Animal Cognition.

That didn’t surprise Danita Cole one bit. Cole, of Johns Island, raised chickens as part of Johns Island Organic farm, now on hiatus.

“Oh, yeah. They really are like that,” she said. Chickens not only have a pecking order, they form cliques. They get affectionate, get offended and fuss. One hen she had got so embarrassed when she lost her feathers while molting that she hid in the corner of the yard under a tree.

“You could just feel her humiliation,” Cole said. Another hen, a favorite, would follow her around like a puppy. When she stepped inside one time, it perched up on the porch rail to wait for her to come back out. She did, with a German shepherd, and the chicken flapped madly away, dropping into the pool.

But when Cole walked to the pool, it swam to her side.

“Roosters will tolerate each other,” Cole said. But if a hawk lands in a tree and a hen is threatened, “they’ll rush over and fight to the death to protect her. It doesn’t matter whose (rooster’s) hen it is. They’ll come with both legs out, rose thorn talons, wings flying. It’s quite scary, really.”

So there’s more to chickens than just a peck. Researchers that Marion cites found startling evidence that even five-day-old chicks can count. And 30-week-old chickens, presented a feeder with a computer “peck” screen that delivered food every six minutes, quickly learned to estimate the lapse, popping it every six minutes or so rather than incessantly.

Among other findings, chickens:

Can demonstrate self-control and self-assessment.Communicate in complex ways.Have the capacity to reason and make logical inferences.Have distinct personalities.

It’s worth pointing out that the mission of the Kimmela Center is to end the exploitation and abuse of non-human animals. Marino makes no bones about it.

“Chickens are misperceived 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,” she said in the paper.

She ended it recommending more study to produce “a more authentic understanding of who they really are.”