Profitable Wonders
‘Next to the Dog, the Fowl has been Man’s constant companion,’ noted the Reverend Saul Dixon, in the introduction to his 1849 Treatise on the History and Management of Poultry. ‘A class of creature inferior to few on earth, gifted with a courageous temper and affectionate disposition.’
Since its domestication, 8,000 (or so) years ago, the chicken’s immeasurable contribution to human welfare has been inseparable from its adaptability and genetic malleability, highlighted – at the time of Reverend Dixon’s treatise – by the ‘hen craze’ that gripped Britain and the United States.
The cross-breeding, under royal patronage, of the scrawny domestic varieties with the exotic Cochin and Shanghai imported from the Far East would give rise to the numerous contemporary breeds distinguished by their intricately designed, diversely coloured plumage – the silver-laced Wyandotte and chestnut Welsummer, the gold-spangled Orpington and black-frizzled Plymouth Rock, the Rhode Island Red and Speckled Sussex, and many others.
But that genetic malleability has also been the chickens’ undoing. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the perversion of the science of poultrybreeding would transform this glamorous bird, with its affectionate disposition, clucking around the backyard, into just so many units of industrial production.
In 1950, the cross-breeding of a Californian Cornish rooster with a New Hampshire hen produced the prototype of the factory-farmed chicken housed in their tens of thousands in vast, noisy, evilsmelling sheds, never seeing the light of day. Fortified by antibiotics and vitamins, each grows from day-old chick to fivepound boiler in just six weeks, before the indignity of being hung upside-down from metal shackles, stunned in an electrified water bath, decapitated by whirring blades and defeathered in scalding water.
Their egg-laying ‘battery hen’ cousins fare, if anything, even worse. Confined with several others in a bare cage, scarcely able to turn around or even stand up, they are prone to broken limbs, deformed feet and prolapsed wombs.
Worldwide, 50 billion chickens annually endure such immiseration, made more poignant still by the investigations of academic researchers revealing their emotional lives and mental attributes to be yet more sophisticated than might be supposed.
Gregarious and social, chickens are relentless communicators, starting even before they are born with the peeps of the chick still within its shell – to which the hen responds with clucking noises, gently turning and pecking at her eggs.
Sixty years ago, American ornithologist Nicholas Collias, deploying the recently-invented sound spectrograph or sonogram, identified 23 distinct vocalisations expressing variously pleasure, contentment, distress, pain, the hen’s advice to her chicks to stay close, food calls, a laying cackle and two distinct warning calls of threats from predators.
More recently, Australian biologist Chris Evans has elaborated on the meaning of these calls with digital audio recordings of the response to highresolution television displays of, for example, a simulated hawk flying overhead, a fox running in from the side or roosters making characteristic sounds. It has emerged that these vocalisations are not so much instinctive as ‘functionally referential’, containing specific information understood by others in a way similar to the way human speech works.
Further experiments have confirmed that chickens have impressive memories, recognising one another after months of separation, can grasp abstract concepts, identify partially concealed objects, anticipate the future and exert self-control – and are empathetic, feeling the discomfort of others.
The findings of such studies, summarised in a review, ‘Thinking Chickens’, in the journal Animal Cognition, would suggest that they are as ‘cognitively, emotionally and socially complex as most other animals’.
It is, however, scarcely necessary to invoke the authority of science to demonstrate the self-evident impressions of generations of admirers. Those who live in close proximity to poultry, writes chicken-fancier (and Director of the Centre for HumanAnimal Studies) Annie Potts, need no convincing of the profundities of their emotional lives, distinctive personalities, likes and dislikes.
She has observed how, when laying, if one hen is separated from her preferred mate, she will call out as she emerges from her nest. ‘Both will then make their way towards each other reuniting independently from the flock,’ she writes. ‘It seems reasonable to understand this as a fondness and concern for the well-being of a particular friend.’