alt Hacker NewsI do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong.
They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.
Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.
Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.
I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.
That was a nice personal discovery.
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As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.
I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)
My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.
The kinds of intelligence they display is really interesting.
They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.
They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).
It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.