So I was reading the campus paper today, and in the mailbag, there’s a letter from a member of PETA citing all the intelligent aspects of chickens. The letter is here (first one on the page).
I’m a bit skeptical about some of these claims (enjoys classical music?) What’s the Straight Dope on all of this?
I hate to do this but Mike the Headless Chicken got along quite well without virtually any of his brain. That should tell you something.
My biology teacher once explained that the bird class has quite a wide range of intelligences. At the top end are crows and parrots, capable of making tools and with planning/memorization skills comparable to many primates. At the bottom end are chickens.
Paint a picture of some corn or other food on a wall. A chicken will run into the wall in an attempt to eat the corn. After taking a moment to get back on its feet, it will then run into the wall again. And again. And again.
Avian intelligence is centered in brain structures called the hyperstriatum and wulst. Like mammalian brains and the cerebral cortex, intelligence in birds appears related to the relative size and development of these areas. In the bird world, chickens come up on the lighter end of the scale. The heavy weights, so to speak, are the corvids and parrots.
This is not to say that chickens are blithering idiots. They are perfectly fine at being chickens. I’d wager they would excel at certain types of learning problems, such as those involving visual dexterity with pecking as an evoked response. They may even outperform “small children” at this task, because that’s what chickens do - they peck rapidly at small objects on the ground.
But are they cognitively superior to a small child? Personally, I hate this kind of one-liner. I can’t assess from what basis the researcher is making this statement. I can’t tell if the author picked up this information from talking with the researcher or gleaned it off the intarweb. How small a child? An infant or three-year old? What cognitive task? There is no specifics to put it in context. (The evolution of this statement will be the line “42. Chickens are smarter than kids” showing up in an email list of 100 Amazing Animal Facts!!!.)
It would not surprise me if chickens DID like various forms of music. Enjoying auditory sensations of various sorts is a common trait in birds, who use noises to communicate and are therefore hardwired to pay attention to these sorts of sensory inputs. However, chickens - either in general or in specific cases - showing enjoyment while listening to music, even classical music, is in no way indicative of intelligence. It just means they like certain types of noises in their environment. It’s like saying a cat is intelligent because it likes to sleep in warm, sunny places or a dog is intelligent because it likes the smell of roast beef.
My co-worker has chickens that will stand on each other’s backs to get to the parts of raspberry bushes they couldn’t otherwise reach. That seems pretty smart.
Yes, but do they cooperate or compete when they do it?
Are we talking about domesticated chickens or wild chickens? Like many animals, I would suspect that the wild variety is considerably smarter than the domesticated variety. The turkey is a good example of this.
Hit reply without my comments…I was about to say that any creature that can have their brain overrridden/temporarily short circuted/whatever you want to call it, simply by rubbing them can not be very smart at all.
(And yes, I am aware of the obvious “but what about women rubbing men” softball that I just lobbed out there for someone)
I think chickens are pretty smart.In fact,I think I read somewhere that some of them are even smarter than their eggs.
[sup]Or was that their egg shells? I’ll check on that.[/sup]
Many species of insects use the same tactics to get food, so I don’t think it puts them that high up on the intelligence totem poll.
When they form a Chicken Pyramid, I’ll be impressed.
They’re smart enough to play tic-tac-toe at the county fair. Although I’ve always suspected that there’s a computer doing it, really and that they’re just peckting at food that drops where you can’t see it at the appropriate moments.
As to the ‘small children’ thing. I suppose if they were small enough. . . nah. When people say ‘children’ they usually mean ambulatory ones. Even crawling children can do all the things listed in the letter as chicken intellegence, plus they are picking up language. They may not be as adroit as chickens, but that’s because their physically less developed.
I have to assume that particular PETA person or group just doesn’t have much appreciation for the intellegence of small children.
That’s because the people at PETA would rather eat small children and raise chickens! 
I had a summer job on a small petting farm several years ago. I was still fairly new to the job when one day, for reasons I now forget, I had to move all the chickens from one pen into the next pen. Most of them were shooed, caught or bagged and dropped into the next pen without much hassle, but the last one was extremely not happy about it. The chase must have looked like a Warner Brothers cartoon; me in overalls with an old feed bag, trying to scoop up that last chicken, which was flapping wildly all over the pen, losing feathers and screeching "BUKKAWK BUKKAWK BAWK BUKBUKBUKBUK BUKKAWWK! " With a “GOTCHA!” I finally tackled the bird, dropped the bag over its head and clenched the top closed.
Silence. Dead silence, and no movement inside the feed bag. Oh, crap, I killed it, broke its neck or something. I opened the top of the bag and peeked in. There was the chicken nestled calmly in the bottom of the bag, blinking and doing that little head-tilt thing as it gazed intently at absolutely nothing.
I learned later that this is pretty typical behavior. It’s as though, if they can’t see something, it’s not there. It couldn’t see me anymore; therefore, everything was hunky-dory.
Keep in mind, this was the smart one of the bunch, the one that recognized danger and made an attempt at evasion. Chikins ar dum. D-U-M dum.
hmmm I think that would be “rear” chickens… 
The PETA people gave me a pamphlet that claimed chickens were as smart or smarter than dogs and cats. My best friend’s mother raises both and says that that statement is foolish.
This is the kind of statement that could only be made by someone who knows nothing about either dogs, cats, or chickens.
From the link in the OP:
I doubt very much that a chicken feels most of these things “just the same” as a dog or cat. Certainly they may be said to feel fear and pain. However, saying that they “show affection,” of feel “happiness” or “loneliness,” is simply projecting human emotions on them inappropriately. A mother hen may be protective of its young, and become distressed when they are in danger, but this doesn’t mean it feels “affection” for them in the human sense. A well fed and contented chicken might be said to be “happy,” but again not in the kind of self-aware sense of a human. And a chicken separated from its flock mates might be distressed by its isolation, but this hardly consititutes being “lonely.”
As others have said, this is a meaningless statement without context. Chickens, like most birds, can probably sense air pressure changes much better than humans, and therefore could be said to have certain 'cognitive abilities" beyond the capacity even of adults.
True but irrelevant to the issue of intelligence.
Nonsense. A chicken might feel some distress for a short period of time when an offspring or flock mate dies, but the words “mourn” and “loved one” are ridiculous in this context.
Irrelevant. Crocodiles also tend their eggs and call to the young inside their eggs, which call back to the mother. Frogs, fish, and insects also tend their eggs.
Irrelevant to the issue of intelligence.
As Broomstick pointed out earlier, even if true, irrelevant to the issue of intelligence.
Well I’ve killed a few chickens during my time on my grandparents farm and I assure you that none of them did anything out of the ordinary that showed any sign of special intelligence to me. In fact you could just sprinkle corn on the ground and have them around your feet as you picked one up and rung it’s neck. The rest didn’t care, they were happy to be getting some corn. Oh, and here’s some useless info: when you did a headless chicken into scalding hot water to get rid of the feathers, keep in mind you just might want to keep something over your nose b/c the smell isn’t all that pleasant.