Chickens are blithering idiots. As a boy one of my duties was to feed and water the chickens, and to lock them into their coop at night. One evening the family had been out somewhere, and came home during a thunderstorm. I ran over to close the door between the chicken coop and the chickenwire pen, and what do you know but the chickens, trying to get out of the downpour, have piled themselves up in the corner between the chickenwire and the wall of the coop, killing a couple at the bottom of the pile. The door to get inside was all the way around the corner, after all, and you can’t expect a chicken to remember how to locate something like that.
Anyone who thinks that chickens have the cognitive ability of a small child is woefully ignorant. They’re far and away the dumbest farm animals I’ve ever worked with.
And persistant. My rooster hates my guts, and will go out of his way to attack me…if he is out [he only tolerates our roommate Phillippa, by the way] I have to carry a 2x4 and play stickball to get him away from me. He spiked me hard enough to take 7 stitches to repair, that is when the kid gloves came off and I upgraded from using a broom to fend him off and a 2x4 to bash him across the yard and stun him long enough for me to go from house to the barn. Phlip has been told next time he attacks the gun will come out and there will not be enough left to cook. Stupid thing doesnt learn that attacking me means pain and a short nonwinged flight of about 5 meters.
Also untrure. Chickens, like most birds, see better than humans. That doesn’t make them particularly intelligent.
The thing is, chickens are good at being chickens. That doesn’t make them particularly smart, just well adapted to their environment. Given the usual fate of chickens in this world, being smart probably is not an advantage.
I had a thought… what if chicken’s WERN’T good at being chickens? :eek:
Or, maybe they are destined to be something else, but evelution hasn’t given the opportunity to excel at thier destiny… like maybe they are destined to be Lotto Number pickers…
But wut if it was one of those PETA Super Chickens that are Geneticly superior to small Children? Hey… that could be a good SD experiment… test a group of chickens to see if they are statisticly better at picking lotto numbers than small children… you could even expand it to other animals like Monkeys. But you should prolly test out different groups of chickens… like 1. Normal Farm chickens… 2. PETA Super Chickens… 3. Wild Chickens… 4. Fried Chicken
Actually, chickens could well be superior to humans at picking Lotto numbers. Humans have a tendency to pick Lotto numbers in a non-random fashion. For example, many people pick their birth dates. If there are fifty numbers from which to chose, numbers from 1 to 31 and especially 1 to 12 will be picked far more often than random expectation. Since this limits the available combinations you are choosing from, your chance of winning will be lowered over a series of games. So having a chicken pick your numbers for you will give you a better chance of winning, assuming the chicken doesn’t pick its own birth date.
As an owner of dogs, cats and chickens, they (chickens) are smarter than some people give them credit for, but not as smart as others claim. How’s that for a dodge. They recognize me, and come running. They run away from people they don’t know. They’ve learned to “tell” me when their feeder is empty by leading me to the food bag and squawking. After playing Round Up The Birdies only twice, they figured out that I wanted them to roost at night in the coop instead of in the trees. They like to watch television and have definite preferences in music. They like country and hate heavy metal. So, they have the smarts to be chickens, they have the brains to learn simple things, but they will never start building any airplanes a la Chicken Run.
Chickens aren’t very smart. Just the same, some of them are smart enough that a group of them from a truck that turned over managed to survive for a number of generations alongside the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles.
According to modern cladistics, birds are all dinosaurs. Specifically, all birds are in a subbranch of theropods called Coelurosauria, which includes both Tyrannosaurus and Maniraptors. The maniraptor clade includes both modern birds and Velociraptor.
I don’t know which branch of extant birds is the oldest branch, but this doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the species is “closer” to dinosaurs. All modern birds are probably descended from the same branch point so probably there is no one “closest” relative – all birds are equally diverged when compared to Tyrannosaurus. The linked site does cite a study which places perching birds basal to many other bird groups, including the chicken one, as compared to a crocodile group, but this is controversial and doesn’t necessarily place perching birds closer to T. rex.
I’m not sure to which “linked site” you are referring. I have not heard that Passeriformes are considered more basal than Galliformes.
This cladogram from one of the linked sites indicates that Passeriformes belongs in a different clade within birds than Galliformes, but not that one is more basal than the other relative to crocodiles.
Most of the cladograms I’ve seen don’t really show any basal modern birds. The evidence shows that Palaeognathae and Neognathae share a common ancestor, but that doesn’t make one more basal than the other. Thus, we can’t really say which modern birds are most closely related to T. rex, especially without tyannosaurid DNA.
There are some extant modern bird groups which are known unambiguously from the Cretaceous (ducks and loons being among them, though again, the Cretaceous versions were not modern species), and some others which are implied to have been around at that time, but that still doesn’t make any closer to T. rex, since all Neornithes are thought to have derived from a common ancestor (not Archaeopteryx, by the way. For those who didn’t already know, “Archie” was a [maybe even the] basal bird, but it was not the direct ancestor of the lineage which eventually produced modern birds).
All we can say unambiguously about the “closest living relative of the T. rex” is that any given modern bird is probably about as related to tyrannosaurs as is any other, and all are much more closely related to each other than to tyrannosaurs.
Okay, folks, did anyone check out the reference? Dr. Evans of Macquarie University has done research on domestic chickens. Although the link doesn’t contain any quotes about their skills relative to human children, you can see that it contains the standard description of how impressive some of the instinctive behavioral features are.
For instance, if you consider that chickens probably are born with “a surprisingly complex system, in which call rate reflects the sender’s preference for a food item, motivational state and the presence of companions,” that might leave a human infant standing in the barnyard dust – at least for the first year or so, with regard to being able to communicate just that sort of thing specifically.
With my limited knowledge of behavioral psychology, I just don’t find that very impressive compared with what human children accomplish over time. We know that human infants don’t have the same level of complex instinctive behaviors that other animals have. No surprise!
As to whether you’ll be chowing down on a sentient entity the next time you have chicken, I think not. But whether you want to eat meat or not really doesn’t depend on whether you think it’s a sentient creature (unless maybe you’re eating chimps). It’s only when you’re trying to convince others that they shouldn’t eat meat that the argument seems to surface. Otherwise, it’s more of an empathic thing or an ethical argument based on the sanctity of life in general (not on intelligence) or a logistical argument based on the supposed efficiencies of eating grains and veggies instead of meat or a health argument… there are lots of potential arguments for vegetarianism without having to look silly by claiming that chickens are just a short intellectual jump from us.
