As for chickens not minding watching members of their flock being killed by a farmer, a man once told me how a small flock of chickens he and some others were keeping on a commune he belonged to at the time were slaughtered in front of each other by a member of their group. Three hens and a rooster who were previously friendly fled the scene.
UPC photo shows hens perching safely in our predator-proof
sanctuary.
(This article was first posted April 27 on
Animals 24-7.)
A fellow activist once asked me if I believed chickens don’t mind
watching and hearing other chickens being killed in their presence.
He asked because a farmer had told him they don’t. He questioned the
credibility of this claim from a person who would do such a thing.
Was it true?
Lest anyone think chickens don’t mind seeing and hearing other
chickens die violently in front of them, or be grabbed by a predator
or otherwise traumatized, nothing could be further from the truth.
As a chicken sanctuary director for more than three decades, I’ve
witnessed the effect on chickens of a hawk or a fox and the terror
these predators inspire in the birds, including the aftermath of
trauma.
I learned the hard way back in the early days of keeping a few
rescued chickens in an unfenced yard. (Those naïve days are long
gone, and our 12,000 square-foot sanctuary is now fully
predator-proof.) One of our chickens, Ethel Murmur, a Cornish-cross
hen we rescued from a slaughter-bound truck spill in Northern
Virginia, was in the yard one Saturday afternoon, next to the porch
with her friend Bertha, when a fox stole Bertha and left her dead in
the woods.
Before this, Ethel Murmur was so vigorous and full-throated that we
named her after the famous Broadway singer Ethel Merman on account
of her imposing character, ample physique, and big voice. Afterward,
Ethel Murmur was never the same. She stopped making a joyful noise,
stopped yelling for attention, and could hardly walk anymore. Her
whole body shriveled, and she died a week later. Although she
herself had not been attacked, she had watched the attack on her
friend, and could not recover.
Another situation arose one morning when I put our brown house hen,
Alexandra, outside with her bantam rooster companion, Josie. It was
spring and the kitchen door was open wide. Suddenly, Alexandra ran
shrieking through the door into the house, jumped up on a table, and
could not calm down. I cried, “Alexandra, what happened?” Panic
stricken, I raced outside. Josie was nowhere. Once again – a fox.
As for chickens not minding watching members of their flock being
killed by a farmer, a man once told me how a small flock of chickens
he and some others were keeping on a commune he belonged to at the
time were slaughtered in front of each other by a member of their
group. Three hens and a rooster who were previously friendly fled
the scene. They disappeared for more than two weeks, before
reappearing, timidly, and never again trustingly. Their behavior
following the slaughter was totally altered, the man sadly said.
In nature, chicken parents will confront a predator by first pushing
their chicks into foliage for safety behind themselves. Puffing out
their feathers and spreading their wings wide, they will charge the
predator while sounding alarm calls. One May day, when a pair of our
hens and roosters produced an unexpected family, the tiny chicks
squeezed through the wire fence to the other side, then peeped
piteously at being stuck there. Shrieking and dashing about, unable
to reach her chicks, the frantic mother hen instinctively flew
straight up into my face when I approached her. (I rescued all five
chicks and sealed the openings.)
When questioning the emotional complexity of farmed animals, we need
to remember that a farmed animal is essentially a natural animal in
captivity. A chicken is a being whose physical environment and
bodily deformations imposed by exploiters have not eliminated the
fundamental instincts, sensitivities, emotions and intelligence in
this bird whose evolutionary home is the tropical forest. Like their
wild cousins of the tropics, domesticated chickens sensing a
predatory threat in a yard during the day will typically react with
choral uproar, fight, flight, and hide behavior.
Chickens in a state of abnormal, chronic fear and severe,
inescapable captivity tend by contrast to become very still and
quiet, evincing what psychologists call learned helplessness –
behavior exhibited by individuals enduring repeated aversive stimuli
beyond their control, even if their senses are on high alert. They
may develop tonic immobility, a condition researchers call "a
fear-potentiated response” to being restrained in a chicken who
knows she or he is going to die.
I am confident that chickens are empathic creatures who are capable
of experiencing not only the imminence of their own death, but the
emotional tones of dread and dying in others trapped in a violent
setting such as an industrial slaughterhouse, a live poultry market,
or a cockfighting ring. I do not doubt that they sense when they
themselves and their conspecifics are in mortal danger, as shown by
their ready response to danger in diverse environments. My view is
reflected in some preliminary scientific studies cited, for example,
by evolutionary biologist Dr. Marc Bekoff in "Empathic chickens and
cooperative elephants: Emotional intelligence expands its range
again" in Psychology Today.
The day after Josie, our little rooster, was grabbed by a fox in
front of Alexandra, I was filled with grief and guilt. “Why oh why
did I let them outside yesterday morning unprotected?” I sat on the
floor and could not stop crying. Here then came big white billowy
Sonia, whom we’d rescued with Josie and other chickens from a filthy
shed in back of a shiny farmers market in Leesburg, Virginia, across
the living room floor. She rested her head against me and began
purring softly over and over. My sorrow deepened with love for this
being, who maybe knew or did not know why I was weeping, but who
sensed my sadness and rose from where she was sitting to plod across
the floor to comfort me in this moment of empathy that we shared in
the tragic world.