Chicken Emotion & Cognition

It’s no secret that chickens have a bad rap. After all, we often call cowardly people "chickens." One reason for this might be that chickens are viewed as commodities-- something to be sold and consumed-- rather than as sentient creatures with valuable lives. Contrary to common stereotypes about chickens, cognitive research reveals that "bird brains" are actually quite mentally rich and complex. As one social scientist puts it, “chickens are just as cognitively, emotionally, and socially complex as most birds and mammals in many areas.”

Evolution has fine-tuned many of the senses that chickens possess. Their skin alone has numerous types of receptors dedicated to measuring temperature, pressure, and pain. Chickens also have an advanced level of eyesight, and they can detect a broader range of colors than even the human eye can detect. Their incredible sense of sight leads to remarkable cognitive traits, including spatial orientation, reasoning, and self-recognition.

Chickens become aware of their environments early on. Two-day-old chicks can grasp object permanence, retrieving objects partially hidden from view. Chickens also can solve rudimentary math problems, as they can count up to five and have a basic understanding of quantity. They perceive time, both past and present events, and they have the ability to anticipate future events.

Chickens also have a sense of self-control, as evident from a recent study that provided chickens with the choice to either (1) peck a key and receive food after two seconds, or (2) peck a different key and receive even more food after six seconds. Many of the chickens chose the latter, which indicates that they were willing to give up an immediate reward in anticipation of a larger, less-immediate reward. This all demonstrates that chickens have the capacity for self-control.

Chickens have a relatively high level of emotional complexity, as evident by their interactions with other chickens and humans. For instance, chickens have between 24-30 different calls that they use to communicate with one another in different scenarios, with research suggesting an “adaptive plasticity in the structure of chicken aerial alarm calls.”

Chickens also display advanced social cognition through their hierarchies. They are able to bond not only with other chickens, but they also bond with humans and with other animals. When not imprisoned on farms, chickens remember and bond with their caregivers, and they have the capacity to recognize over one hundred different human faces. They also remember other animals they meet, such as dog and pig friends. Another amazing fact about chickens is that they experience rapid-eye-movement during sleep, which indicates that they, like humans, have the ability to dream! Individual chickens have their own unique personalities, dreams, and emotionally rich lives.

Contemporary research on chicken cognition paints a portrait of chickens that is unfamiliar to most of us. Chickens are undoubtedly smarter than we give them credit for, and they display many of the same emotions and feelings that humans do. So, the next time you encounter a chicken, remember that her life is just as enriching and complex as the lives of other animals!