More than a McNugget: Chicken Communication

Chickens can talk.  Kind of.  And they're delicious.  What's not to love?

I am a very strange eater. I tell people I'm a vegetarian so as not to bore them, but I'm actually just terribly picky about what animals I will ingest. I believe in transparency of consumption, and in equality of guilt throughout the chain of production (I'll save that for another blog entry). That being said, I like to eat animals. And I don't get to do it very often. So it was a special occasion when Chris bought us a locally farmed, free-range, organic chicken this week and endeavored to roast it in my grandmother's old roasting pan, using the crappiest apartment oven of all time.

The experience got me thinking about chickens. We Americans eat a lot of chicken, and we rarely think twice about it. Most people who decide to cut out only a portion of their meat consumption choose to eliminate pork and beef, often for religious or health reasons. But I think we also feel a stronger connection to the cow and the pig than we do to the lowly broiler chicken.  The former two are mammals, which means we have stronger family ties. Also they are furry, which reminds us of puppies. I could imagine hugging a piglet, a clean one, whereas I can't imagine hugging a chick. Pigs and cows are also a lot larger than chickens, which for some unknown reason seems to mean a lot to us (think of the big fuss over whales). And then of course there is the big I-word: intelligence. Cows and pigs are most certainly more intelligent than chickens.


Carnivores and vegetarians alike love to throw around claims about animal sentience and intelligence as if it is hard core scientific fact. But if I've learned anything studying assessment theory for the past six months, it's that intelligence is not something we can measure accurately even in humans, so what makes us think we can objectify it in animals? Still, there are certain basic mental feats that we consider indications of some amorphous type of animal smarts. One of those is representational communication. In other words, a certain noise or combination of noises that correspond to a certain meaning. The representational nature of human communication is what makes blogging possible; when I type the word chicken, I don't have to show you what I'm talking about, because the combination of the syllables chic- and -ken mean something specific to you already.

As kids, we are taught over and over and over by a myriad of animated movies and TV shows that almost all animals can communicate just as well as we can, and make intelligent decisions based on those communications.  If we are to take these childhood representations as fact, most of this communication is actually inter-species, a kind of encoded English.

Also they tend to wear warm weather accessories but no pants. Oh how those movie producers lie!

There are a lot of animal behaviorists interested in representational communication. Most of this research is on apes, our well known evolutionary cousins. But the creature responsible for the McNugget (or at least a portion of it) turns out to be an interesting research subject as well. Dr. Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia has found that certain rooster calls trigger nearby hens to look for specific information, i.e. food or predators. These calls have "language-like qualities," and indicate a level of social sophistication that has only been shown for a few mammals. This video shows a hen responding to a call indicating the presence of food.  She walks toward the loudspeaker and begins to peck at the ground, looking for the food.

Personally, I'm impressed.  It may not be Chicken Run, but these birds, which we stuff into windowless houses so pungent with ammonia that they develop sores all over their bodies, and breed to grow so quickly that they cannot support their own weight, aren't empty-headed idiots placed on this Earth as yet another commodity. They are the product of millions of years of evolution, including several thousand (at least) of domestication, which has given them a unique language-like ability to communicate, and I think that they deserve some respect.

So I got out the cloth napkins, and lit some candles.  Cheers to the talking chicken!

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more
Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep
Pick a little, talk a little, cheep!