Final Club Fowls

It has come to my attention that approximately one week ago, every newly-elected member of the Phoenix, S.K. final club was given a live chicken and instructed by their elders to keep close contact with them while going to classes, going to final club events and so forth. Apparently, most carry the chickens around in boxes that seem to be a little over a foot square. They get jostled around between classes, take up seats (in their boxes) amongst the noisy crowds in the dining halls and are penned-up in student rooms at night (on the floor). They apparently have no time to run free except when trying to escape, and to my knowledge, there is no one giving them proper animal care.

This is a deeply worrying situation. Why do the more senior, and one would imagine wiser, members of the Phoenix club feel that this is appropriate treatment of animals? Would they feel as comfortable treating a human child in this way? Presumably not. But stop and think for a moment why a child would never be treated in this fashion, whereas there is little concern about the well-being of chickens. Perhaps the Phoenix club seniors feel that chickens are like the caricatures in a Gary Larson cartoon--silly beasts doing silly things. If so, why not do what we please with them?

Like humans, chickens have emotions and thoughts. Their emotions and thoughts are unlikely to be exactly like ours, but that is not really the issue. The issue is: How do chickens feel when they are cooped up in a small box? How do they feel when they are being chased around a dining hall, with people who are orders of magnitude larger than they are peering down on them? How must they feel being kept away from other chickens?

So that the seniors, and newly elected members, can properly reflect on these questions, consider what we currently know about chicken behavior, emotion and thought. Chickens live in large social groups and form complex dominance hierarchies whereby high-ranking animals out-compete low-ranking animals for access to valued resources. Chickens have a complex vocal repertoire consisting of approximately 25-30 different vocalizations. Within this repertoire, they have one call for aerial predators and one for ground predators. They also have food calls, and scientists have discovered that these vocalizations function like our words--they refer to objects and events in the external environment. Chickens can even use these calls in a deceptive fashion. Hardly little robots with feathers!

There is more. Several years ago, the British government attempted to pass a bill that would allow those rearing battery hens to remove the chipped wood from their cages. Several animal researchers complained, saying that hens "need" chipped wood. On the face of it, this seems like a highly anthropomorphic claim. After all, how would one know what chickens need or want? Marian Dawkins, an internationally recognized researcher in animal behavior, designed an extremely clever experiment to address this claim.

She constructed a cage with two identical compartments. The compartments were connected by a transparent door. In one compartment, she placed chipped wood on the floor while the other compartment was empty. In one experiment she placed a hen inside the empty compartment. Immediately, the hen pushed the door open and walked into the chipped wood side and began scratching--a species-typical behavior. If the hen started on the chipped wood side, she never went over to the empty side.

Next, Dawkins tightened the screws on the door, making it more difficult to move from one side to the other. Even when the hen was forced to bang into the door in order to open it (i.e., she injured herself), she nonetheless pushed in order to get into the compartment with chipped wood.

Do chickens want/need chipped wood? Yes, without a doubt.

I hope this example provides a flavor of what chickens feel and think. What the students in the Phoenix club have done is inexcusable. Not only do they have no right to treat chickens with such horrible care, they have no right to treat any animal in such unthoughtful and uncaring ways. There are complicated issues associated with the use of animals for research, a topic that I am intimately familiar with. But a case such as this is unambiguous. It should never have started and should stop immediately. One hopes that these students will feel remorse concerning their pathetic treatment of a creature that shares this planet with us.

Marc D. Hauser is Professor of Psychology in the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program.