Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (12 page)

When you move chickens, do not combine birds from different groups. Doing so adds to the stress of moving and increases peck-order fighting.

Avoid introducing new chickens into your flock, which causes a reshuffling of the peck order. Constantly introducing new birds that disrupt the peck order causes stress that can lead to feather pulling, vent picking, and other forms of cannibalism.

If you do introduce new birds, reduce bright lighting to make the unfamiliar birds less conspicuous.

If your chickens constantly fight, look for management reasons such as poor nutrition, insufficient floor space, or inadequate ventilation.

Never cull a bird just because it is lowest in the pecking order — as long as you have at least two birds, one will always be lowest in rank.

Quite the opposite of attempting to reduce stress by minimizing fights,
cockers
(fighting-cock owners) deliberately maximize aggression. Some poultry historians believe cockfighting played at least as large a role in the domestication of chickens as the production of eggs and delicious meat — maybe even a larger role. By the time of the Roman Empire, chickens had been bred along specialized lines, with the Romans emphasizing birds that provided a good return for farmers, while the Greeks emphasized fighting ability. To this day certain lines are bred to fight.

These so-called sporting fowl are housed year-round in barrels or small individual A-frames, where they have little protection from the elements. Only the toughest survive, making the game breeds incredibly hardy.

Some individual cocks, and some entire breeds, have a natural inclination to fight, although they generally fight only until one backs down. But that’s not always the case. I had two roosters — of a breed not known for a strong inclination to fight — that persisted in beating each other up. We constructed a separate pen to house one of the cocks with a few hens, but the two continued to batter each other through the wire partition, obviously intent on killing one another.

This behavior is more typical of the game breeds that have been around for centuries, although even among these breeds the strains bred for show have had much of the fight bred out of them. The characteristics of a fighting breed include a big-boned body with heavy muscling (for strength), long neck and legs (for reach), hard feathering (for armor), and a hardy constitution (for resilience). The cocks are fed a specialized diet and given regular exercise. The result is a lean, tough, sinewy bird.

Cocks in the fighting pit are paired by weight and have been trained not to back down but to keep fighting, sometimes to the death. To make matters worse, the cocks are fitted with razorlike spurs to augment their already formidable natural spurs.

Once considered one of America’s national sports, cocking is now considered barbaric and inhumane and is illegal in the United States and its territories. However, a Nevada corporation is promoting a bloodless variation designed to “make this ancient sport legally acceptable . . . and allow gamecock breeders to continue to legally test and perfect their breed.” Called
game cock boxing
, it involves covering the spurs with foam rubber gloves and fitting each cock with a vest that electronically records hits, so cocks can spar without causing injury.

The term “dumb cluck” in referring to a stupid person is an insult to chickens. For far too long chickens have been considered not too bright, a perception that has gradually changed over the past few decades. In the 1960s German physician Erich Baeumer wrote a little book — the title translates as
The Stupid Chicken? Behavior of Domestic Chickens
— in which he demonstrated that chickens are a lot brighter than most people believed at the time.

Since then, the status of chickens in general has improved to the point that some have moved from the coop to the house — and I don’t mean the hen house. Chickens have joined parrots and parakeets as house birds. I met my first house chicken in the 1970s. This hen slept at night in a basket in her owner’s bedroom, traveled in the car happily tucked in her little basket, and enjoyed watching television. I have since heard from several other house-hen owners that chickens love TV.

Although a chicken needs to spend daily time outdoors doing what chickens do — sunbathing and dust bathing, scratching in dirt, and snacking on such tasty treats as creepy crawlies and tender green things — more and more people find that a single hen of a calm breed makes an entertaining but challenging house pet. The limiting factor is the difficulty of house training a chicken.

I have brooded lots of newly hatched chicks in my house — at one time I was known as the lady who keeps chickens in her living room — but I never had a chicken as a house pet. I did once have a rooster that was smart enough to come into the basement in the wintertime to warm himself by the woodstove whenever I was dumb enough to leave the basement door open.

That a chicken can recall the past and anticipate the future has been proven by British researchers. In 2003 Siobhan Abeyesinghe and her colleagues at the Silsoe Research Institute determined that chickens are capable of exercising self-control, which requires resisting immediate gratification in anticipation of a future benefit.

To determine if chickens are capable of self-control, they offered hens a choice between an immediate but small payoff and a larger payoff available after a delay. The impulsive hen choosing the less-delayed reward obtained less value, while the hen waiting for a more valuable reward was able to maximize her gain by showing self-control.

Hens were trained to peck colored keys giving them a choice between access to feed almost immediately (impulsive) but only for a short time and waiting
several seconds (self-control) to gain access to feed for a longer period that allowed them to eat more. A significant number of the hens held out for more feed, proving chickens are capable of understanding that a current choice has future consequences.

Training a chicken is simple but not easy. It requires a consistent, methodical approach and lots of patience. It involves carefully watching the bird for the behavior you desire, letting it know at the precise moment it has done what you want it to do, rewarding it in a timely manner, and repeating the exercise until the bird gets it right every time.

This type of training is known as operant conditioning and is the way chickens and other animals normally learn how to behave, whether they are being deliberately trained or are learning to survive in their natural environment. The technique was perfected by the late Keller and Marian Breland, who founded the field of applied animal psychology, and Bob Bailey, who married Marian after Keller passed away.

The Brelands and the Baileys developed a system of training dog trainers by teaching them to train chickens. They chose chickens for this purpose because chickens are readily available, learn fast, and lack complex social interactions. A chicken is behaviorally pretty simple — focusing most of its attention on eating, not being eaten, and making more chickens — so altering its behavior is relatively simple. On the other hand, a chicken moves fast, offering a challenge to the experienced animal trainer and the novice chicken owner alike.

Until 1990 the Brelands demonstrated the results of their training method at the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where chickens and other trained animals performed tricks with little or no human intervention. In one exhibit a chicken named Casey pecked a small baseball bat to hit a home run, then rounded the bases of a scaled-down baseball field. In another exhibit a chicken enclosed in a fiberglass box played tic-tac-toe against human visitors.

The method perfected by the Brelands involves obtaining a desired behavior by using positive reinforcement, or a reward. A positive reinforcer may be anything a chicken wants, seeks, or needs — most commonly food. The idea is that if you reinforce a behavior, it’s more likely to occur again. If you don’t reinforce it, it’s less likely to recur.

Reducing or eliminating an undesirable behavior is done through nonreinforcement, or the withholding of a reward. It is not the same as punishment, which is difficult to apply to get the response you want. Even when punishment
is successful as a training tool, it represses (rather than eliminates) the undesired behavior exhibited.

To modify a chicken’s behavior, first determine exactly what behavior you want, then shape the chicken’s behavior by breaking down your training sessions into baby steps that eventually lead to your goal. Start with a simple step the bird can easily handle and in subsequent training sessions gradually escalate toward your goal behavior.

To offer a timely reward, you have to know your chicken so well you can tell what it’s going to do before the bird does it; otherwise your reward will be late, and the bird won’t associate it with the desired behavior (or may associate the reward with an undesired behavior). If your chicken seems unable to grasp the concept, most likely your timing is off. Follow the established technique, and your chicken’s behavior should steadily improve. Keep your training periods short (10 to 15 minutes) and consistent, and remain calm. If you feel yourself getting upset or frustrated, end the session early.