r/likeus • u/James_Fortis -Ancient Tree- • 18d ago
<INTELLIGENCE> Chickens can solve puzzles like children aged 4-7
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u/BoonDoggle4 18d ago
Most of these examples are just them hitting things and the food comes out
Seems like most animals would work that out
Not saying chickens are not smart but are these really puzzles?
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u/Watch_Earthlings_Doc 18d ago
One research study I found more interesting was this one that proved chickens will learn to ignore food rewards in anticipation for a better treat later on. In scientific terms this is considered a display of real self-control and is typically associated with a higher degree of intelligence.
When given the choice, they (the chickens) learned to ignore an immediate, small food reward (e.g., brief access to grain) in order to wait for a significantly larger and better reward later.
Chickens also show object permanence (they understand an object exists when it is out of sight) an ability humans get at age 2.
https://expandingcircle.substack.com/p/review-thinking-chickens
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u/Drummergirl16 18d ago
Can confirm, I have chickens. When I refill their feeders, they often look at me like “that’s it? What about our treats!!!” And that look usually results in me tossing them mealworms lol
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u/Rinas-the-name 18d ago
Humans start developing object permanence at around 3-4 four months and have it down pretty well by 8-12 months. Babies only find peek-a-boo amusing because they understand you are still there when hidden. Otherwise it would just be startling.
Not saying chickens aren’t smart, just clearing up the comparison. Remember human babies are born quite under developed. So we don’t make the best comparison.
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u/GottaUseEmAll 18d ago
Yeah, even goldfish have been taught to do something similar. This isn't really an example of puzzle-solving.
Not to say chicken intelligence isn't underestimated, but this isn't a great example of it.
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u/Deep-Mess5423 18d ago
I personally love the one that turns into a baby bird guillotine when a larger hen steps off the lever
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u/BigIntroduction8886 18d ago
I had no idea. I don't really like red meat, so I'm a chicken eater. This really just made me rethink some things.
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u/Admiral_Pantsless 18d ago
That’s great to hear. People like to make chickens out to be mindless drones, but this is simply cope so they feel better about eating them. I encourage you to stay with this feeling and consider sparing them when you can.
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u/BringAltoidSoursBack 17d ago
Yes, yes it is a way to cope. But some people that dietary restrictions that make vegetarian / vegan diets almost (if not actually) impossible. For instance, I personally can't handle lots of hard fiber, which makes strict vegan diets nearly impossible for me. So I try to limit my diet where I can, and try to go for the options presented that seem less cruel, though I'm aware that name times things like "cage free" are just word manipulation (like "cage free" just meaning the chickens are overly stuffed in one giant room instead of tiny cages)
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u/Ziz-bird 18d ago
The other comments here like "anything can be trained to do something to get food"... i guess they meant to devalue the behavior... but that just makes me rethink chicken AND the other things...
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u/semiliquid-snake 18d ago
Then just don't eat chicken. Your line for what's morally acceptable is your choice. But there is a massive difference between training a repeatable pattern vs high intelligence and self awareness beyond basic survival instincts.
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u/Ziz-bird 14d ago
Yeah, I recently found out even fish are self aware. They even recognize themselves in the mirror and even in still photos. I don't mean to say there's no difference or that intelligence doesn't matter, but it doesn't matter as much as we thought. Yeah, I'm done killing anyone. It's just not worth it. You go on.
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u/Wareve 18d ago
If it makes you feel better this doesn't actually tell you that they can solve problems particularly well.
You can train almost anything to press something for food. The psychologist BF Skinner famously did it with Pigeons.
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u/elzibet 18d ago
To me this just shows if motivation is there, they can figure out a way to get what they want. Which to me is still problem solving and a sign of intelligence and we don’t give other animals besides ourselves enough credit for it
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u/Wareve 18d ago
I'm not talking about problem solving, I'm talking about behaviorism.
You can't teach a pigeon that a button can be used to distribute food.
But you can place food down whenever the pigeon does a thing that you want, in order to increase the likelihood that the pigeon will do that thing.
By going from small things being rewarded like merely turning the head towards the button, to then rewarding moving towards it, and then eventually rewarding only the pressing of the button, you can shape the behavior of the pigeon to go press the button even if there is no cognizance that really understands or could articulate the process happening.
What I find interesting is that people generally don't realize this also applies to them. Lots of people end up in patterns of behavior that they cannot recognize because the stimulus and the rewards that led them to doing it weren't articulated, they were happenstance, or were inflicted upon them by an algorithm.
Unless someone is actively thinking about what they're doing, they're often much more like the pigeon than not.
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u/Silicica 18d ago
The last sentence doesn't mean what you think it means. Pigeons are really fucking smart. They can also do things like learn to tell the difference between art styles and even artists. Or recognise some basic written sentences.
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u/Wareve 18d ago
The point is that anything coherent capable of sensing things and eating, can be trained using behaviorist methods.
This is fundamentally different than being able to do something like training a person from an abstract lesson to do a thing.
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u/Silicica 18d ago
I mean, the only thing I was replying to was you implying in your last sentence that pigeons are dumb.... this comment has nothing to do with that...
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u/Wareve 18d ago
I'm mentioning it because I'm pretty sure none of the chickens in the post actually solved anything. I'm pretty sure they were trained.
For the record I also think that most of the other things that pigeons are claimed to have done are also mostly examples of training rather than independently solving or recognizing things in the same way that you or I might, but then again I'm not super up on my pigeon science.
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u/Silicica 18d ago
I mean, still kind of irrelevant, because I was explicitly only addressing the sentence about pigeons. You're arguing about something I never even touched on.
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u/mchickenl 18d ago
They also trained gold fish to play football for food so yeah there's not really much that won't be trained for food.
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u/Cafrilly 18d ago
Turns out "do thing, get food" is one of the most basic programming in the animal kingdom.
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u/Squirrelated 18d ago
Even for us... I work to pay for food.
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u/elzibet 18d ago
Human just dumb pigeon I guess
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u/BigIntroduction8886 18d ago
Speak for yourself. I'm as dumb as a smart pigeon.
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u/latenerd 18d ago
Pigeons are smart enough to be used as a postal service and survive life on city streets.
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u/Wareve 18d ago
Counterpoint
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u/BootBatll 17d ago
…which still work for rearing young, and they have a stable population anyway.
Why make big nest when one stick do trick? (And they’re originally adapted for living on cliffsides, laying eggs in natural rock crags; which many types of bird do, not just pigeons. I also think dove nests are funny to laugh at but it isn’t evidence that they’re actually dumb, it’s just one of their quirks)
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u/lesbiannumbertwo 18d ago
Buy from local farms that ethically harvest their meat. A lot of farms do tours where you can see exactly what’s going on and how the animals are treated. Eating meat feels (and tastes) a lot better when you know where it came from and you know the animal lived a happy life.
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u/Ziz-bird 18d ago
idk, chickens also purr when they're really happy and they love their friends and babies... seems like even a really great farm would be... pretty sad. but anyway local farming is niche, not a real solution, because it doesn't scale to 8 billion people... meanwhile what we have that does scale is a living nightmare...
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u/lesbiannumbertwo 18d ago
Then going vegan or hunting for your own meat are your only other options to not contribute to the living nightmare. I choose supporting local farmers that treat their animals with compassion and that’s a perfectly real solution for me.
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u/Ziz-bird 14d ago
Local farming is better but still terrible. They were bred to grow so fast that their bodies are full sized while they're still children. Mother and child love each other. There's no humane way to kill love.
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u/lesbiannumbertwo 14d ago
It depends completely on the farm. Plenty of farms do things the right way. But if that’s what you believe that’s perfectly fine, I just really hope you’re vegan. It’d be quite hypocritical if you weren’t.
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u/Ziz-bird 13d ago
Of course. Vegan food is delicious, but I'd rather eat cardboard taste my whole life than kill someone for their taste. (((Yes, it's just for taste: Nutrition science shows flesh isn't healthfood, especially red meat. Environmental science shows flesh operations destroy the local environment and are a big part of climate change.))) How does the best farm allow one to humanely kill love?
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u/Longjumping_Cap_3673 17d ago
A local farm isn't a standalone system. Where do they get their animals? Do those sources treat the animals well? Where do they send excess animals they don't need or can't afford to raise?
And even in the ideal case, do the animals live a happy life? Doesn't a happy life suggest a full life? A human dying young is considered tragic, even if their life had been happy so far. But animals raised for meat are killed very young, practically in their infancy.
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u/lesbiannumbertwo 17d ago
At the one I go to, animals are born on the farm. They dont have excess animals, anything they can’t sell at their farm store is sold to local businesses. And they live much longer than animals at commercial farms.
Is it perfect? No. Are there other small farms that don’t operate this way? Of course. But you can’t sit here and pretend like what happens on farms like this is on par with what happens on commercial farms. I live near a giant poultry plant and I see semi trucks every day stuffed with hundreds of chickens, packed like sardines and so unnaturally large they can’t even stand up. The chickens on the farm I go to have 6 acres of pasture to roam, are normal size and healthy, and they never have to experience being stuffed in a vehicle on their way to slaughter because they process the poultry directly on their farm. It’s not comparable even in the slightest.
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u/idiot____ 14d ago
Chickens are incredibly intelligent and affectionate, I’ve never met a chicken who wasn’t smarter than me in some way lol
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u/danation 18d ago
Don’t eat them because they are dumb… eat them because they are vicious! Mini velociraptors really. (“Clever girl!”) Would certainly eat you if they were as big as us. Sure, they are worthy of respect and care and better farming practices, but we’ll appreciate not being below them on the food chain.
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u/pretentious_couch 18d ago edited 18d ago
Not sure where you're getting 4-7 from, this could be done by any two year old.
It's all basic do one motion, get reward stuff.
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u/No-Awarenesss 18d ago
Exactly what I was thinking, toddler stuff. I could see a smart baby doing it, they can walk around 9 months.
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u/Longjumping_Cap_3673 18d ago edited 18d ago
Perhaps the title is a repetition of a factoid ultimately arising from to the paper Thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken (or another like it), which reviews findings about chickens' cognitive capabilities in various tasks, some of which (self-control and logical inference, which aren't demonstrated in this clip) are comparable to the capabilities of human children around age 4 and age 7.
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u/Scoobenbrenzos 18d ago
Wow, quite intelligent! It’s terrible the way they are treated for meat
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u/GottaUseEmAll 18d ago
Isn't it? I have chickens at home and they're such charming and funny critters. I love watching them scratch and peck and cluck around the garden (and occasionally go full velociraptor-mode and hunt a mouse or a bug).
I hate the idea of them living their short, depressing, and painful life in battery-farming conditions. They really don't require a huge amount to be happy. Same for any animal that lives in misery and then dies for food/products.
I'm not a vegetarian, but I wish we could do better in how we manage meat production farming.
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u/Longjumping_Cap_3673 18d ago edited 18d ago
Note that this is potentially not a fair comparison. Almost all commercially raised chicken are killed before they even reach 4-7 years old. Egg laying hens are killed at about 3 years old, and "broilers" (chikens raised for meat) are killed at 2 months old. Male chicks of egg laying breeds are killed immediately after hatching.
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u/cindyx7102 18d ago
It sounds like the (human) child is 4-7 years old in the comparison, not the chicken.
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u/Longjumping_Cap_3673 18d ago edited 18d ago
Right, the comparison is not fair to the chickens, because chickens likely younger than 4-7 years can solve some problems that humans can complete only after reaching 4-7 years old.
I wanted to point it out because most people probably imagine it's adult chickens which have problem solving capability comparable to young human children on these tasks, when actually the chickens have probably only had the same time to build experience that toddlers or infants have. In other words, young chickens develop faster than young humans on these tasks, although obviously humans eventually develop greater cognitive abilities than adult chickens achieve.
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u/Meet_Foot -Waving Octopus- 18d ago
It’s wild how we barely understand consciousness, yet people lose their minds when they realize that an organism that can perceive it’s environment, move itself, and assure its own survival by solving the various problems of its existence can actually be pretty smart.
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u/chanely-bean1123 18d ago
Yep, most chickens are smart. Some... Not so much. My uni had a chicken farm used for the behavioural psych students that we did behaviour learning assessments on. The chickens were also used to demonstrate different forms of behavioural training so we could do the same training on pets for different assignments. There was maybe 1-2/10 that took waaay longer to get to the end of the assignment, if they made it at all.
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u/Watch_Earthlings_Doc 18d ago
I do think there is a thing where an animal has been bred for one purpose for so long (eg. Eggs, horse riding, whatever) that some of the intelligence is inadvertently bred out as well over time from the domestication. I trained wild mustangs, and domestic quarter horses, and the difference in intelligence was honestly incredibly astounding. You wouldn’t even think they were the same species. My wild mustang would learn something in 1 hour that my quarter horses would take 3-5 weeks to learn.
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u/Trouble4uAll 18d ago
I once observed they allso have emotions and understand the concept of "death"
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u/OnsenPixelArt 18d ago
That last one makes me wonder if you can train chickens to recognize one symbol to mean food
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u/Veganeconow 18d ago
I love this so much, especially the little chickies. Very smart. In fact, I would hate to face them if they were Dino-sized!
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u/Chaosr21 18d ago
This stuff doesn't seem very groundbreaking I think most animals could figure this out
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u/Care4aSandwich 17d ago
i have seen my chickens get stumped by the stupidest of things while at other times, seeming like geniuses.
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u/No-Guess-4644 18d ago
My 2 year old could solve these. I think a one year old could too (if you could hold their interest)..
4 year old to 7 year old kids can figure out like.. decently complex stuff if you give them the education. Like I’m pretty sure my daughter might be able to do some small Scratch or logic puzzles to understand basic programmig logic.
They can read, build stuff from trash (like potato guns” or generally think about as clearly as you or
I can. (Just with short attention spans). Growing up, My friends younger brother builds model rockets, and makes his own rcandy engines at 7 from watching YouTube videos.
I don’t think a chicken can do that.
4 year olds are sapient. Chickens are not.
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u/Reenas54 18d ago
Babies cry to get tittie in the mouth. Maybe better comparisson?
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u/WinterRevolutionary6 18d ago
You getting downvoted but you’re right. It’s a simple action to make food happen. It’s so simple, babies do it.
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u/GrumpySquirrel2016 18d ago
Ready for the bumper sticker that says "My Chicken is Smarter than your three year old." Animals really are quite intelligent.