Chickens' Startlingly Complex Social and Emotional Lives

Source: Engin Akyurt / Pexels

Chickens are fascinating and extremely intelligent and deeply emotional sentient beings with unique personalities. Many people often blow them off as being dumb and unfeeling, but this sweeping dismissal ignores who they truly are and that being called a bird brain is really quite the compliment. When I learned of award-winning author Sy Montgomery's latest highly acclaimed gem titled What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird, I couldn't wait to read it and hear what she had to say about her most interesting and important book, written from an eye-opening up-close-and-personal bird's eye view, of these amazing birds. Here's what Sy had to say about the world according to these amazing birds.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write What the Chicken Knows?

Sy Montgomery: Everyone knows a chicken, right? Wrong! Though most folks can pick one out of a lineup of other birds, we don't know them at all. Google the definition of "chicken" and the most likely first answer defines these birds as a type of food. Though generally our relationship with chickens is of a culinary nature, on the dinner plate is not the best place to get to know someone.

I once sat next to a man on an airplane who told me that chickens are stupid and dirty and mean. It turned out he worked on a factory farm, where chickens are kept in dirty, overcrowded conditions where they go insane—as any human would under similar circumstances.

Source: Atria Books

But I knew from my decades of sharing our property with free-ranging hens and roosters that these surprising birds are remarkably intelligent and emotional creatures. Each is blessed with a unique and often affectionate and playful personality. Chickens know a great many things—including many things that we humans do not.

I wrote this book to share the wonder of getting to know chickens as individuals. And once people understand who chickens really are, it's my hope that they will no longer reward with their food dollars the people who perpetrate the horrible cruelty of factory farms on these sensitive and intelligent birds.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

SM: All of my books (and there are nearly 40 so far) are, at heart, love stories. Some are memoirs; some profile scientists or activists; some report on field expeditions in remote areas like the Amazon, the Serengeti, the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, and the cloud forests of Papua, New Guinea. But all tell of the wonders of the more-than-human world. And once you get to know an orangutan or an emu, a turtle or a tarantula, a snow leopard or a pink dolphin or a tree kangaroo, you can't help but be thunderstruck by their gifts—of sensory powers we lack, of intelligences we can't perceive, of social or emotional connections we fail to appreciate. Knowing that a shark can sense the electrical current of my heartbeat, that a dog can smell my stress, and that a hummingbird experiences colors I cannot see, makes me fall madly, passionately in love with this planet all over again. And that's what I repeat with every page of every book I write.

MB: Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important book?

SM: Of course, I hope my friends who have enjoyed my other books read this one, too. But perhaps most of all, I hope to reach people who haven't thought much about animals in general or about chickens in particular and that this book brings their attention to these "ordinary" creatures long enough to realize what a mistake we make if we dismiss them. They are amazing! Once you realize this, the entire world seems more alive, and we feel more at home on this Earth—embedded in a matrix of thinking, living, feeling creatures who love their lives like we love ours.

Sy snuggles Dominique, a chicken friend.

Source: Sy Montgomery

MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?

SM: Embedded in the stories of my decades of living with chickens are lots of new studies showing how smart, social, and perceptive chickens are. Hens and roosters have a number of very specific calls to tell each other about the nature of available food ("This stuff is especially delicious!") and predators ("Watch out for a hawk above" versus "There's a ground predator, but it's pretty far away"); at least one chicken appears to have invented a name for her owner and to have taught that name to her flockmates. Roosters even pass the "mirror test" that has been considered a hallmark of self-awareness and, thus, higher sentience, when the test is administered in a biologically relevant way.

Chickens also can see polarized light, which is invisible to us. They have excellent spatial reasoning. And relationships are extremely important to chickens. Each can recognize about 100 individual chickens and can recognize individual humans, too. (They do it the same way we do: by focusing on the individual's face.) Roosters and chickens invent and play games. They sometimes reward their human friends with gifts: One made a point of laying her eggs in the house for her favorite person. Another brought his human shiny objects he thought she would enjoy, much like a suitor might bring jewelry to a lover.

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

SM: Especially since the pandemic, many folks have gotten interested in keeping chickens, generally raising them for eggs, and sometimes for meat. There are a number of books that came out recently on this topic. This is not my book! It's essentially a memoir of what the chickens I have come to know over the years have shown me about who these birds are: strong, smart, sensitive individuals who can be wonderfully inventive and affectionate companions—who just happen to lay delicious eggs.

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MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about these amazing animals they will treat them with respect?

SM: Absolutely. And once people learn who chickens really are, my hope is they'll be cruising the vegetable aisle at the grocery more often.