The Science Is In: Elephants Are Even Smarter Than We Realized

 

The Science Is In: Elephants Are Even Smarter Than We Realized [Video]

We now have solid evidence that elephants are some of the most intelligent, social and empathic animals around—so how can we justify keeping them in captivity? 

Feb 26, 2014 |By Ferris Jabr

 

Elephants walking in line in Amboseli national park, south Kenya.
Credit: blieusong/Flickr

One day in 2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe and honeydew. Stretching out his trunk, he managed to get the fruit and break off a piece of the branch, but the rest of the tasty leaves remained tantalizingly out of reach. Without hesitation he marched straight to a large plastic cube in the yard, rolled it just beneath the hovering bamboo and used it as a step stool to pull the whole branch to the ground. Seven-year-old Kandula had never before interacted with a cube in this manner. Determined to satisfy his stomach and his curiosity, he did something scientists did not know elephants could do: he had an aha moment.


A couple weeks earlier a team of researchers led by Diana Reiss and Preston Foerder, then at City University New York, had visited Kandula’s home at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. They placed sticks and sturdy cubes around the yard and strung a kind of pulley system similar to a laundry line between the roof of the elephant house and a tree. From the cable they dangled fruit-tipped bamboo branches of various lengths both within and without of Kandula’s reach. After preparing the aerial snacks they retreated out of sight, turned on a camera and waited to see what the young elephant would do. It took several days for Kandula to achieve his initial insight, but after that he repeatedly positioned and stood on the cube to wrap his trunk around food wherever the scientists suspended it; he learned to do the same with a tractor tire; and he even figured out how to stack giant butcher blocks to extend his reach.




Other elephants had failed similar tests in the past. As it turns out, however, those earlier studies were not so much a failure of the elephant mind as the human one. Unlike people and chimpanzees, elephants rely far more on their exquisite senses of smell and touch than on their relatively poor vision, especially when it comes to food. Previously, researchers had offered elephants only sticks as potential tools to reach dangling or distant treats—a strategy at which chimps excel. But picking up a stick blunts an elephant’s sense of smell and prevents the animal from feeling and manipulating the desired morsel with the tip of its dexterous trunk. Asking an elephant to reach for a piece of food with a stick is like asking a blindfolded man to locate and open a door with his ear. “We are always looking at animals through our human lens—it’s hard not to,” Reiss says. “But now we have an increased appreciation of diverse thinking creatures all around us because of so much research on so many species. It’s fascinating to try and find ways of testing animal minds so they can show us what they are really capable of.”

People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully catalogued astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving. Because of recent experiments designed with the elephant’s perspective in mind, scientists now have solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a sense of self.

Despite the sharpened awareness of elephant sentience, many zoos around the world continue to maintain or expand their elephant exhibits and increasing numbers of heavily armed poachers are descending on Africa to meet the soaring demand for ivory, killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year. The U.S. recently banned ivory trade, with some exceptions, but there have been no steps toward outlawing elephant captivity. At least a few zoos are using the latest science to transform their elephant enclosures, giving the animals more room to roam as well as intellectually stimulating puzzles. Only some zoos can afford to make such changes, however, and many elephant experts maintain that, given everything we know about the creatures’ mental lives, continuing to keep any of them locked up is inexcusable.

Mental mettle

The modern elephant mind emerged from an evolutionary history that has much in common with our own. The African bush and forest elephants, the Asian elephant, and their extinct relatives, the mammoths, all began to assume their recognizable forms between three and five million years ago in Africa. As Louis Irwin of The University of Texas at El Paso explains, both humans and elephants adapted themselves to life in Africa's forests and savannas around the same time, emigrating to Europe and Asia; both evolved to live long and often migratory lives in highly complex societies; both developed intricate systems of communication; and both experienced a dramatic increase in brain size.

Over the years numerous observations of wild elephants suggested that the big-brained beasts were some of the most intelligent animals on the planet. They remembered the locations of water holes hundreds of kilometers apart, returning to them year after year. They fashioned twigs into switches to shoo flies and plugged drinking holes with chewed up balls of bark. They clearly formed strong social bonds and even seemed to mourn their dead (see “When Animals Mourn” in the July 2013 issue of Scientific American). Yet scientists rarely investigated this ostensibly immense intellect in carefully managed experiments. Instead, researchers looking for evidence of exceptional mental aptitude in nonhuman animals first turned to chimpanzees and, later, to brainy birds like ravens, crows and some parrots. Only in the past 10 years have scientists rigorously tested elephant cognition. Again and again these new studies have corroborated what zoologists inferred from behavior in the wild.
Scientists living among herds of wild elephants have long observed awe-inspiring cooperation between family members. Related elephant mothers and their children stay together throughout life in tight-knit clans, caring for one another’s children and forming protective circles around calves when threatened by lions or poachers. Elephant clan members talk to one another with a combination of gentle chirps, thunderous trumpets and low-frequency rumbles undetectable to humans, as well as nudges, kicks and visual signals such as a tilt of the head or flap of the ear. They deliberate among themselves, make group decisions and applaud their achievements. “Being part of an elephant family is all about unity and working together for the greater good,” says Joyce Poole, one of the world’s foremost elephant experts and co-founder of the charity ElephantVoices, which promotes the study and ethical care of elephants. “When they are getting ready to do a group charge, for example, they all look to one another: ‘Are we all together? Are we ready to do this?’ When they succeed, they have an enormous celebration, trumpeting, rumbling, lifting their heads high, clanking tusks together, intertwining their trunks.”

Cynthia Moss, director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and another preeminent elephant researcher, once saw a particularly amazing example of elephant cooperation. One day the young and audacious Ebony, daughter of a matriarch named Echo, bounded right into the midst of a clan that was not her own. As a show of dominance, that clan kidnapped Ebony, keeping her captive with their trunks and legs. After failing to retrieve Ebony on their own, Echo and her eldest daughters retreated. A few minutes later they returned with all the members of their extended family, charged into the clan of kidnappers and rescued Ebony. “That took forethought, teamwork and problem-solving,” Moss says. “How did Echo convey that she needed them? It's a mystery to me, but it happened.”

In 2010 Joshua Plotnik of Mahidol University in Thailand and his colleagues tested elephant cooperation in a controlled study for the first time. At a Thai conservation center, they divided an outdoor elephant enclosure into two regions with a volleyball net. On one side stood pairs of Asian elephants. On the other side the researchers attached two bowls of corn to a table that slid back and forth on a frame of plastic pipes. They looped a hemp rope around the table so that when both ends of the rope were pulled simultaneously the table moved toward the elephants, pushing the food underneath the net. If a single elephant tried to pull the rope by him or herself, it would slip out and ruin any chance of getting the food. All the elephants quickly learned to cooperate and even to patiently wait for a partner if the scientists prevented both animals from reaching the rope at the same time. One mischievous young elephant outsmarted the rest. Instead of going through the hassle of tugging on one end of the rope, she simply stood on it and let her partner do all the hard work.





Some scientists studying wild elephants have argued that, in addition to cooperating for survival’s sake, the creatures are capable of genuine empathy. Poole recalls, for example, one elephant flinching as another stretched her trunk towards an electric fence; it was fortunately inactive at the time but had been live in the past. Elephants often refuse to leave their sick and injured behind, even if the ailing animal is not a direct relative. Poole once observed three young male elephants struggle to revive a dying matriarch, lifting her body with their tusks to get her back on her feet. Another time, while driving through Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, Poole saw a female elephant give birth to a stillborn baby. The mother guarded her dead calf for two days, trying over and over to revive its limp body. Realizing that the grieving mom had not had any sustenance this whole time, Poole drove near her with an offering of water. The elephant stretched her trunk inside the car and eagerly drank her fill. When she was done, she remained with Poole for a few moments, gently touching her chest.

When elephants encounter an elephant skeleton, they slow down, approach it cautiously, and caress the bones with their trunk and the bottoms of their sensitive padded feet. Elephants do not show the same interest in the remains of other species. In one experiment elephants spent twice as much time investigating an elephant skull as those of either a rhinoceros and buffalo and six times longer probing ivory than a piece of wood. Moss has witnessed elephants kicking dirt over skeletons and covering them with palm fronds.

Plotnik and renowned animal behavior expert Frans de Waal of Emory University recently teamed up to study elephant empathy. On a monthly basis between the spring of 2008 and 2009 they observed 26 Asian elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, looking for signs of what researchers call “consolation.” Many animals are capable “reconciliation”—making up after a tussle. Far fewer animals display true consolation: when a bystander goes out of his or her way to comfort the victim of a fight or an individual that is disturbed for some reason. On dozens of occasions Plotnik and de Waal saw elephants consoling one another. A perturbed elephant often perks up its ears and tail and squeals, roars or trumpets. Over the course of the study, many elephants behaved in this way, because of an altercation, because they were spooked by something—such as a helicopter or dog—or for an unknown cause. When other elephants recognized these signs of anxiety, they rushed to the upset animal’s side, chirping softly and stroking their fellow elephant’s head and genitals. Sometimes the elephants put their trunks in one another’s mouths—a sign of trust because doing so risks being bitten.

The aspect of elephant intelligence that is the trickiest to gauge—the one that has really challenged scientists to think like an elephant—is self-awareness. Scientists now have preliminary evidence that elephants are indeed self-aware, overturning previous findings. To determine whether an animal has a sense of self, researchers first place a mark on an animal’s body that it can identify only with the help of a mirror. Then they wait to see if the animal tries to get rid of the mark when it encounters its reflection. Doing so, the reasoning goes, means the animal understands when it is looking at itself rather than another animal. In the earliest studies on elephant self-awareness, researchers placed a one by 2.5–meter mirror outside the bars of an enclosure, angled in such a way that the animals could see only the upper thirds of their bodies. The elephants reacted to the reflection as they would to another elephant, raising their trunks in greeting. When the scientists dabbed the elephants’ faces with white cream, the animals failed to recognize that the marks were on their own bodies.

But what if the experimental design itself prevented the elephants from understanding that they were looking at themselves in the mirror? After all, elephants identify one another primarily by touch, scent and sound—not sight—and the animals in the study could not physically investigate the mirror. So Reiss, de Waal and Plotnik decided to redo these experiments, this time allowing the elephants to use all their senses.

In 2005 the trio constructed a 2.5 by 2.5–meter shatterproof mirror and bolted it to a wall surrounding an elephant yard at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. Three female Asian elephants named Patty, Maxine and Happy were free to approach and inspect the sturdy mirror at their leisure. When they first encountered the contraption, Maxine and Patty swung their trunks over it and attempted to scale the wall to which it was attached, as though checking to see whether another elephant was hiding behind the glass. When they found nothing, all three elephants swayed their trunks and bobbed their heads while looking right into the mirror, just as we might wave our hands to see whether a shadow is our own. They stared at their reflection and stuck their trunks inside their mouths as though searching for snagged spinach.

A few days later the scientists painted a white X onto the right side of each elephant’s face. Maxine and Patty did not seem to notice the marks, but Happy began to touch the X on her face with her trunk after strolling past the mirror a few times. Eventually she faced her reflection and repeatedly swiped at the painted part of her face with the tip of her trunk.

The fact that only one of three elephants noticed the X on its face might seem a disappointing performance, but it is actually quite remarkable. Reiss points out that even in studies with chimpanzees—which most researchers accept are self-aware—sometimes fewer than half pass the mirror test. Plotnik argues that expecting elephants to pay attention to a random blotch on their face may not have been the best test of their self-awareness anyhow. Whereas chimpanzees are fastidious groomers that spend hours picking nits and gnats out of one another’s hair, elephants stay clean by getting dirty, routinely spraying themselves with dust and dirt to deter insects and parasites. And they love to galumph in mud. “There’s no reason to think elephants would have same kind of vanity," Plotnik says.

Brains behind bars

All the new evidence of elephant intelligence has intensified the debate about whether to continue keeping the creatures in captivity. Former elephant caretaker Dan Koehl maintains a thorough database of elephants around the world. He has records of 7,828 elephants currently in captivity: 1,654 in zoos or safari parks; 4,549 in "elephant camps" where tourists can ride the animals; 288 in circuses; and the remaining in temples, sanctuaries or private residences. The latest research on the well-being of U.S. zoo elephants is not particularly encouraging. With mny collaborators, animal welfare expert and Vistalogic, Inc., consultant Cheryl Meehan recently completed a gint study on nearly all of the 300 or so elephants in North American zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The researchers assessed the physical and mental health of captive elephants with a combination of photographs, videos, blood and hormone tests, veterinary reports, and surveys filled out by caretakers: about 75 percent of the elephants were overweight or obese; between 25 and 40 percent had foot or joint problems of some kind depending on the year; and 80 percent displayed behavioral tics, such as pacing and continual head bobbing or swaying.

Stephen Harris of the University of Bristol and his colleagues conducted a similar study on U.K. zoo elephants in the late 2000s. I asked him whether it is possible to keep an elephant physically and mentally healthy in a zoo. His answer was succinct: “No.” The elephants he studied spent up to 83 percent of their time indoors, often in cramped conditions; the majority had abnormal gaits; 75 percent were overweight; more than 50 percent had behavioral tics; and one individual displayed tics for 14 hours in a single day. Captive elephants also have higher rates of infertility and die younger on average than their uncaged counterparts. Whereas wild elephants migrate great distances through the forest or savanna in search of food and water—eating huge amounts of tough, fibrous grasses and shrubs that are difficult to digest—zoo elephants spend too many hours standing idle on concrete and consume calorie-rich foods they would rarely encounter in their native habitat. Researchers have also learned that many zoo elephants do not get the rest they need because they do not like to lie down and sleep on stone or other hard surfaces.

Few zoos can adequately re-create the complex social life of wild elephants. Female elephants in captivity are often strangers acquired from here and there. Any friendships that do form can dissolve in an instant when a zoo decides to relocate an animal. “Sometimes people treat these creatures like furniture,” Moss says. Researchers used to think that male elephants, which leave their clans in young adulthood, were loners. They now know, however, that male elephants socialize extensively with one another. Yet zoos mix males and females in ways that would never occur in the wild and try to offload adult males if they become too cantankerous or lustful.

Now that the evidence of the elephant’s intellect and emotional life is no longer mostly anecdotal the zoological community faces even more pressure to answer a daunting question: Why keep elephants in captivity at all? Zoos usually give two main reasons: to rescue elephants from dire situations, such as the threat of poachers or the stress of living in so-called rehabilitation centers in Asia that keep the creatures leashed to trees; and to teach the public how amazing elephants are, in hopes of promoting their conservation.

These arguments have become increasingly tenuous over time. Few elephants in zoos today were rescued from an awful life; instead they were born in captivity. In the mid-2000s zoos embarked on an especially aggressive captive elephant breeding program, trying to compensate for all the animals they had lost to disease and frailty. "For every elephant born in a zoo, on average another two die," concluded a comprehensive 2012 investigative report by The Seattle Times. As for educational outreach, modern technology has rendered zoos obsolete. “When I was a kid we had no television and even when we did wildlife images were very few,” Harris says. “You went to the zoo to interact with elephants, to ride on them and touch them—there was no other way to get a sense of them. Now of course there’s an information overload. You can get a sense of scale and see all kinds of wonderful behaviors from photography and films that you would never see in captivity.” Consider how much one can learn from vivid scenes of wild elephants in a nature documentary of Planet Earth caliber compared with the experience of staring at an arthritic bobble-headed zoo elephant.

Other scientists think that, even if there are few good reasons to keep elephants in zoos in the first place, arguing for an abrupt end to elephant captivity is naive and idealistic, especially outside North America and Europe. “Although I believe all elephants should be wild, unfortunately that is not realistic," Plotnik says. In Asia, where he works, people have been using elephants as beasts of burden for centuries and currently have thousands of the animals captive in camps. Suddenly releasing all those animals is simply not feasible; there may not even be enough wild habitat left to accommodate them all. Plotnik thinks the best way forward is maintaining the wild Asian elephant population through conservation and slowly phasing out the captive one by finding new, equally lucrative jobs for elephant caretakers. Moss wants something similar for elephants in zoos in the U.S. and Europe: “I would like to see them live out their lives and have no more breeding or importation.” Meehan hopes the kind of information she has collected will help improve the well-being of zoo elephants.

In recent years at least a few zoos have been trying to use animal welfare science to make their elephant enclosures more like sanctuaries. The Oregon Zoo in Portland is close to remodeling its elephant habitat in a way it claims will improve the livelihood of its four male and four female Asian elephants. Elephant Lands, set to open in 2015, is a hilly 2.5-hectare habitat covered mostly in deep sand rather than concrete and featuring a 490,000-liter pool for wallowing, bathing and playing. Elephants will be free to roam from one part of the terrain to another, explains elephant curator Bob Lee, which should hopefully allow males and females to interact as they choose. Various feeding machines will provide elephants with food at random intervals, because studies have linked such unpredictability to healthier body weights. Other feeders will exercise the elephants’ trunks and brains with out-of-reach snacks and mechanical puzzles.

Refurbishing elephant enclosures so they are roomier and more intellectually stimulating is at once an acknowledgment and dismissal of the research on elephant intelligence and welfare. After all, if the zoos really have the animals’ best interests at heart, they would close their elephant exhibits. In 2005 the Detroit Zoo became the first to give up its elephants solely on ethical grounds. Spending so much time in close quarters—and waiting out the harsh Michigan winters indoors—left their two Asian elephants physically and mentally ill. Wanda and Winky were moved to the Performing Animal Welfare Society's (PAWS) 930-hectare sanctuary in San Andreas, Calif. A handful of zoos have followed suit, but they are in the minority.

Ed Stewart, president and co-founder of PAWS, thinks that even his massive haven is not adequate to keep the elephants as healthy as they would be in the wild. "Elephants should not be in captivity— period," he says. "It doesn’t matter if it’s a zoo, a circus or a sanctuary. The social structure isn't correct, the space is not right, the climate is not right, the food is not right. You can never do enough to match the wild. They are unbelievably intelligent. With all of that brainpower—to be as limited as they are in captivity—it's a wonder they cope at all. In 20 years I hope we will look back and think, 'Can you believe we ever kept those animals in cages?'"

The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken

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The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken

Chickens are smart, and they understand their world, which raises troubling questions about how they are treated on factory farms

Feb 1, 2014 |By Carolynn L. Smith and Sarah L. Zielinski

In Brief

• Mounting evidence indicates that the common chicken is much smarter than it has been given credit for.
• The birds are cunning, devious and capable of empathy. And they have sophisticated communication skills.
• That chickens are so brainy hints that such intelligence is more common in the animal kingdom than once thought.
• This emerging picture of the chicken mind also has ethical implications for how society treats farmed birds.

In the animal kingdom, some creatures are smarter than others. Birds, in particular, exhibit many remarkable skills once thought to be restricted to humans: Magpies recognize their reflection in a mirror. New Caledonian crows construct tools and learn these skills from their elders. African grey parrots can count, categorize objects by color and shape, and learn to understand human words. And a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball can dance to a beat.

Few people think about the chicken as intelligent, however. In recent years, though, scientists have learned that this bird can be deceptive and cunning, that it possesses communication skills on par with those of some primates and that it uses sophisticated signals to convey its intentions. When making decisions, the chicken takes into account its own prior experience and knowledge surrounding the situation. It can solve complex problems and empathizes with individuals that are in danger.

These new insights into the chicken mind hint that certain complex cognitive abilities traditionally attributed to primates alone may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. The findings also have ethical implications for how society treats farmed chickens: recognizing that chickens have these cognitive traits compels moral consideration of the conditions they endure as a result of production systems designed to make chicken meat and eggs as widely available and cheap as possible.

Chatty Chickens

It has taken researchers almost a century to figure out what is going on in the brains of chickens. The first inklings emerged from studies conducted in the 1920s, when Norwegian biologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe established that the birds have a dominance system, which he named the “pecking order” after noting that chickens will enforce their leadership by administering a sharp peck of the beak to underlings whenever they get ideas above their station.

The next major breakthrough in understanding the chicken mind came several decades later. The late Nicholas and Elsie Collias, both at the University of California, Los Angeles, categorized the birds' calls and determined that chickens have a repertoire of about 24 different sounds, many of which seem to be specific to certain events. For example, when faced with a threat from above, such as a hungry eagle, the birds crouch and emit a very quiet, high-pitched “eeee.” The clucking sound that most people associate with chickens is actually one they use when encountering a ground predator. The discovery of food elicits an excited series of “dock dock” sounds from males, especially when a judgmental female could be listening.

These early findings suggested that more happens in the chicken's walnut-size brain than one might think. The vocalizations appeared to encode specific information intended to evoke a particular response from onlookers. Yet connecting these sounds and movements with their true meaning proved difficult until the development, in the 1990s, of technology that allowed researchers to test their hypotheses more rigorously. It was then that the late Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and others began to use digital audio-recording devices and high-resolution televisions to test the function of chickens' array of sounds under controlled conditions. In essence, they created a virtual reality for the birds, surrounding a test cage with TVs that allowed them to change what a chicken encountered—a companion, a competitor, a predator—and to record how it responded to a variety of situations. A test chicken might see a simulated hawk flying overhead, or a fox running toward it from the side, or a rooster making a series of dock-dock sounds.

This virtual reality led to a truly astonishing revelation: the sounds or movements an individual chicken makes convey specific information, and other chickens understand it. A chicken need not see an aerial predator, for instance, to behave as if one was there; it needs only to hear the warning call from another bird. The chickens' calls are “functionally referential,” as behaviorists would say—meaning that they refer to specific objects and events broadly in the way that words used by people do. In a chicken hearing the calls, the sounds appear to create a mental picture of that particular object, prompting the bird to respond accordingly—whether to flee a predator or approach a food source.

The virtual world also revealed that individual chickens tailor their messages for their audience. A rooster that sees a threat overhead, for example, would make an alarm call if he knows a female is nearby, but he would remain silent in the presence of a rival male. Females are equally selective, only sending up an alarm when they have chicks.

Taken together, these findings suggested the sounds did not simply reflect a bird's internal state, such as “frightened” or “hungry.” Instead the chickens interpreted the significance of events and responded not by simple reflex but with well-thought-out actions. Chickens, it seems, think before they act—a trait more typically associated with large-brained mammals than with birds.

By Hook or by Crook

The referential calls showed that chickens are more cognitively sophisticated than they have been given credit for. The research also raised an intriguing question: If these birds have the ability to communicate information about environmental events, might they also withhold that news or even broadcast misinformation when they stand to benefit from such deceitful behavior? Further insights have come from studies of other forms of chicken signaling.

Scientists have known since the 1940s that the birds perform complex visual displays in connection with the discovery of food. The most prominent of these displays is a series of actions collectively called tidbitting, in which an alpha rooster twitches his head rapidly from side to side and bobs it up and down, picking up and dropping food over and over again to signal to a female that he has found something tasty. This performance is the main way he lures a mate. Scientists thought the subordinate males, for their part, focus on keeping a low profile, so as to avoid attracting negative attention from the alpha. Yet some observations of chickens in their social groups hinted that the pecking order of the birds might not be quite as orderly as researchers initially thought. In fact, mounting evidence indicated that chickens could be devious bastards.

Human observers initially missed this underlying drama because interactions between members of the flock are short and often secretive; the birds prefer to hide in the tall grass and among the bushes. At the same time, it is just not possible for a single person to monitor all the chickens at the same time. To minimize those difficulties, one of us (Smith) came up with a solution she called “Chicken Big Brother.”

Smith and her colleagues wired the outdoor aviaries at Macquarie University—large outdoor spaces with lots of vegetation, surrounded by nets on all sides—with multiple high-definition cameras and an array of microphones to catch every move and sound the birds made. They then analyzed the resulting recordings.

As expected, the alpha in any group would crow to show he was the master of the territory. He would perform the tidbitting display to attract the ladies. And he would make alarm calls to warn the flock of danger from above.
It was the subordinates that provided the twist. The team expected that these males should keep to themselves, to avoid the harassment of being chased, pecked and spurred by the alpha if they dared to make a play for his girl. Yet the cameras and microphones revealed a more complex story. These lesser males employed surreptitious tactics in a way previously thought impossible for the birds: they performed only the visual part of tidbitting—making the head motions without making the dock-dock sound—thus creating a new signal that could quietly attract a mate while sidestepping the wrath of the alpha rooster.

The fact that the subordinate males modify the tidbitting signal in this way to secretly seduce the hens demonstrated a behavioral flexibility that shocked researchers. But they had yet to plumb the full depths of the birds' deviousness.

To examine the animals' behavior more closely, they added more technology to their tool kit. The chickens' vocalizations were often so subtle that Smith and the other researchers were unable to catch them, even with the extensive camera-and-microphone setup. They needed a way to record every call as it was made and heard by each of the individual chickens.

Ideally, they would outfit the chickens with little backpacks carrying lightweight wireless microphones similar to those reporters wear when working out in the field. But where to find the right materials for those packs? Bras, Smith thought, could do the trick. She began a hunt for old ones with easy-to-latch hooks and preferably colored black so they would not stand out against the feathers. Smith cut off the hooks and adjustable straps and attached these parts to the microphone to create a harness. Once strapped to a bird's waist, the jury-rigged apparatus—affectionately dubbed Chicken Big Brother 2.0—would record what the chicken said and heard.

Smith was particularly keen to take a closer look at how the animals respond to danger. The previous research showing that males would sometimes call out when they saw an aerial predator, such as a hawk, was puzzling because making those squeals would place the rooster at greater risk of getting noticed and attacked himself. Scientists had assumed that the male's need to protect his mate and offspring was so critical that making the call was worth the risk. Yet Smith wondered if other factors influence the calling behavior.

It turns out they do. Using Chicken Big Brother 2.0 to eavesdrop on even the quietest communications revealed that males sometimes made calls for selfish reasons. The birds monitored the danger to themselves and their rivals and were more likely to call if they could both minimize their own risk and increase a rival's. A male calls more often if he is safe under a bush and his rival is out in the open, at risk of being picked off by a swooping predator. If the rooster is lucky, he will protect his girl, and another guy will suffer the consequences.

This strategy is known as risk compensation, and it is yet another skill that chickens have in common with humans. Many of us will take on more risk if we perceive a mitigating factor. People will drive faster when wearing a seat belt, for example, or when in a car equipped with antilock brakes. Male chickens will likewise take more risks if they feel more secure.

Mother Hen

The chicken's list of cognitive skills continues to grow with each scientific discovery. Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento in Italy has shown that young chicks have the ability to distinguish numbers and use geometry. Given a half-completed triangle, for example, chicks can identify what the shape should look like with all its parts. And research published in 2011 by Joanne Edgar of the University of Bristol in England and her colleagues revealed a softer side of these sometimes Machiavellian birds, demonstrating that they are capable of feeling empathy.

In Edgar's experiment, mother hens watched as their chicks received a harmless puff of air that ruffled their downy plumage. The chicks perceived the puff as a threat and showed classic signs of stress, including increased heart rate and lowered eye temperature. Intriguingly, their mothers also became upset simply by observing their chicks' reaction. They showed the same signs of stress the chicks exhibited even though the hens themselves did not receive the puff of air and the chicks were in no obvious danger. The hens also made more clucking calls to their chicks. These findings indicate that chickens can take the perspective of other birds—an ability previously seen in only a handful of species, including ravens, squirrels and, of course, humans.

The fact that the common chicken, which is not closely related to other bird species known for their braininess, has such advanced cognition suggests something interesting about the origin of intelligence. Perhaps it is rather more common in the animal kingdom than researchers have thought, emerging whenever social conditions favor it as opposed to being a rare, difficult-to-evolve trait.

 

For its part, the chicken presumably inherited its cognitive prowess from its wild ancestor, the red junglefowl, which lives in the forests of southern and Southeast Asia. There the ancestral chicken society consisted of long-term, semistable groups of four to 13 individuals of varying ages. A dominant male and a dominant female headed each group, and as in many other societies, those in charge got what they wanted, whether it be food, space or sex, mostly by keeping their subordinates in line. Males spent much of their time strutting their stuff for the females and providing them with food; females carefully observed the males, judging them on their actions and remembering what each had done in the past; they shunned the ones that were deceptive or nasty. A rooster's reputation was important to his long-term success with the hens, and competition for the females was fierce.

Competition within the flock was not the only source of pressure on the birds' mental capacity. They also faced a range of threats from outside the flock—including predators such as foxes and hawks—each of which necessitated a different escape strategy. These conditions forced the fowl to develop clever strategies for dealing with one another and the dangers around them, as well as ways to communicate about all these situations. Those characteristics are still present in the domestic chicken.

That such a litany of abilities belongs to animals that humans eat by the billions naturally raises questions about how they are treated. Birds that would typically live in small flocks in the wild can be penned in with up to 50,000 others. A potential 10-year life span is shortened to a mere six weeks for chickens raised for meat. They are killed so young because these birds have been genetically selected for such fast growth that allowing them to become any older would subject them to heart disease, osteoporosis and broken bones. Egg layers fare little better, living only 18 months in a space about the size of a sheet of printer paper.

The chicken's flexibility and adaptability, derived from its social red junglefowl ancestor, may have been part of its undoing, letting the birds survive even under the unnatural and intense conditions in which humans now raise them. This type of farming will likely continue as long as most people are unconcerned about where their food comes from and unaware of chickens' remarkable nature.

Consumers have begun to effect change, however. In Europe and some U.S. states, such as California, new laws are being passed that require improved housing conditions for egg-laying chickens, largely driven by buyer demand for better animal welfare, as well as healthier food. In Australia, producers now actually highlight the positive conditions under which they raise their animals, competing for a growing population of ethical consumers. Yet there is still more to be done. The conditions under which meat chickens are raised have largely gone unscrutinized.

Researchers have just begun to elucidate the true nature of chicken intelligence, but one thing is already certain: these birds are hardly the “dumb clucks” people once thought them to be.

This article was originally published with the title "Brainy Bird."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

 

Carolynn “K-lynn” L. Smith is a research fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research investigates communication and cognition in animals ranging from giant cuttlefish to elephants. She is the joint recipient of a 2010 Australian Museum Eureka Prize.

Sarah L. Zielinski is a freelance science writer in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Science, Science News and Smithsonian, among other publications.

5 Myths About Dog Behavior That Often Lead to Tragedy

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5 Myths About Dog Behavior That Often Lead to Tragedy

Dogs don't say "I love you" with a hug. Here's why you shouldn't either (at least as far as dogs are concerned).

Melissa Berryman  |  Apr 24th 2013  |   144 Contributions

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I’m a dog behaviorist, and here’s a headline that makes my blood boil: "Dog on Trial after Attacking Child."

It’s from a story on a Pointer-Hound mix named Milo, a dog who had never caused any problems. Milo was napping on the couch in his home in January when a 6-year-old neighbor arrived. The boy sat down on the couch and started petting the sleeping dog. The child was bitten in the face after being left alone with the dog. No one witnessed the incident.

Dogs read certain friendly human behaviors as hostile. What big teeth you have by Shutterstock.

The dog was put on trial for an accident that's preventable when people understand what our behavior means to dogs. I not only have spent years studying dog bites but I also teach classes on safety and liability protection for dog owners. I also provide community safety solutions and promote the right way to behave around dogs through the Dog Owner Education and Community Safety Council. I’m the author of People Training for Good Dogs: What Breeders Don’t Tell You and Trainers Don’t Teach.

The legal system can be harsh to dog owners. Unhappy laywer by Shutterstock.

 

Dog owners are set up for failure because our default is to blame the dog. Owners get fined or sued for repeated human mistakes. Dogs often pay with their lives for mistakes made by people. That's the case for Milo. At his Feb. 27 hearing in Mansfield, MA, authorities voted to euthanize him.

To avoid this, prevention has to be the priority. Sure, it's cute to us when the baby hugs the dog. But dogs do not say 'I love you' with a hug. When one dog 'hugs' another, it's an act of domination. People should understand that humans shouldn't hug dogs. Yet the message for children to hug dogs is prevalent in our culture, and the facial bites continue.

Here are some other common misperceptions people have about dog and human behaviors -- and how you can change to prevent catastrophes.

1. When greeting a new dog, extend your hand for it to sniff

Know how to approach a dog you’re meeting for the first time. A young man and his dog by Shutterstock.

 

Dogs don't sniff each other's paws when greeting and like us prefer to be asked before being touched by a stranger. Instead, ask the owner and then also ask the dog by tapping your hand on your thigh simulating a wagging tail and act friendly. The dog will relax and nuzzle you, need to sniff more to get to know you, or will stay away.

2. Breed dictates temperament

Dogs, first and foremost, are predatory canines that live in groups. Breeds are generalizations that enable breeders to better market the product they sell. What dictates temperament is their pack position -- the role that you, the human, play in the group and the rank of group members.

“Where do we rank?” is what dogs ask humans. Group of Welsh Springer Spaniels by Shutterstock.

 

Dogs have superior/inferior interrelationships and command and defer accordingly. And just as siblings in a family have the same parents yet are very different, one cannot purchase behavior by buying a dog of a certain breed.

3. When a dog charges, there is nothing you can do

 

When a dog charges you, it's trying to decide if you are friend, foe or prey. Their eyesight is poor so hats, sunglasses and other objects you may push or carry can scare them. Act like a friend and pretend you are not afraid. Stand facing the dog with relaxed body language, tap your thigh with your hand and use a high-pitched voice for a friendly greeting like "good girl." Fake it if you are afraid.

4. Posting "Beware of Dog" protects you from liability if your dog injures someone on your property

 

This won’t do much for you after the fact. Beware of the dog by Shutterstock.

 

Dogs can only read body language. These signs make people react to your dog in a fearful manner, which is more likely to cause a dog to consider visitors prey and bite them. Use No Trespassing and Dog At Play signs instead.

 

5. Only bad dogs owned by bad people bite

Even responsible dog owners operate under the same false beliefs about human and canine behavior. They are also encouraged to take a passive role concerning their dog. Any dog can bite especially when it feels personally threatened, is exposed to prey behavior or thinks that someone lower in rank threatens its resources, such as food, toys, bedding and the attention of its owner.

About the Author: Melissa Berryman is a former Massachusetts animal control officer and national dog bite consultant who founded the Dog Owner Education and Community Safety Council. She designed and teaches a safety and liability class for dog owners, from which People Training for Good Dogs is derived. She has worked with more than 10,000 dogs.

Posted in DOGSTER TIPS, TRAINING, BEHAVIOR, ASK A TRAINER