Why did the chicken cross the barn? To sign up for the scientific study

It was a crisp October day at Farm Sanctuary, and inside the small, red barn, the chicken people were restless.

A rooster, or maybe two, yodelled somewhere out of sight. A bruiser of a turkey strutted through an open door, tail feathers spread like an ornamental fan. And a penned flock of white-feathered hens emitted tiny, intermittent squeaks, an asynchronous symphony of chicken sneezes.

The hens were experiencing a flare-up of a chronic respiratory condition, said Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast, the sanctuary’s manager of research and animal welfare, who was preparing to enter the chicken pen. She donned gloves and shoe covers, threw on a pair of blue scrubs and then slipped inside, squatting to bring herself face-to-face with the first hen who approached.

“Who are you?” she cooed.

Prasad-Shreckengast meant the question literally. She was trying to find the birds that were enrolled in her study: an investigation into whether chickens — animals not often heralded for their brainpower — enjoy learning.

But her question was also the big philosophical one driving the new, in-house research team at Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit that has spent more than 35 years trying to end animal agriculture.

They have their work cut out for them: The US alone keeps more than 90 million cattle and slaughters more than 9 billion chickens (and 200 million turkeys) a year. But there are some signs of a societal shift. In a 2019 Gallup Poll, nearly 1 in 4 Americans said that they had curbed their consumption of meat. A jury recently acquitted activists who ferried two piglets away from a factory farm. Fast-food giants are adding faux meat to the menu, and just last week the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to lab-grown chicken.

A growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behaviour and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.

Farm Sanctuary, which was founded in 1986, has always held that farm animals are sentient beings, even referring to its feathered and four-legged residents as “people.”

“They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,” said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

Now, the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“Our hope,” Torgerson-White said, “is that through utilising really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.”

The sanctuary is conducting the research in accordance with its own strict ethical standards, which include giving the animals the right to choose whether or not to participate in studies.

Consequently, the researchers have sometimes found themselves grappling with the very thing that they are keen to demonstrate: that animals have minds of their own.

And today, the birds in “West Chicken” seemed a bit under the weather. Prasad-Shreckengast crossed her fingers that a few of them might still be up for a brief demonstration.

“Hopefully,” she said, “people will be feeling like — chicken people will be feeling like — they’re eager and interested in participating.”

‘Somebody, not something’

Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses. “We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,” said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organisation. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon “living animals left for dead,” he recalled. “And so we started rescuing them.”

They opened sanctuaries in New York and California, establishing educational programmes and advocacy campaigns. (They raised money, in part, by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)

And in 2020, the organisation, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Baur put it, “these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there. There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.”

The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research “without dominance, without control, without instrumentalisation.”

Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — including blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and the studies must benefit the animals. And participation is voluntary. “Residents must be recognised as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”

The idea is not entirely novel. Zoo animals, for instance, are often trained to cooperate in their own health care, as well as in studies that might stem from it. But such practices remain far from the norm.

For Farm Sanctuary researchers, voluntary participation was not only an ethical imperative but also, they thought, a path to better science. Many studies have been conducted on farms or in laboratories, settings in which stress or fear might affect animals’ behaviour or even impair their cognitive performance, the researchers note.

“Our hope is that they’re able to tell us more about what the upper limits are for their cognition and emotional capacities and social structures because of the environment that they’re in and because of the way we are performing the research,” Torgerson-White said.

Although the approach is unconventional, outside scientists described the sanctuary’s ethical guidelines as admirable and its research questions as interesting.

“The idea that you could study these species, who are usually only studied in sort of pseudofarm conditions, in more naturalistic environments that actually meet not just their needs but even their most arcane preferences — I think they’re right,” said Georgia Mason, who directs the Campbell Center for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph. “I think that really allows you to do something special.”

The researchers decided to start with a study on the much-maligned chicken and the birds’ emotional response to learning. “We call it ‘The Joys of Learning,’ but we don’t know that for sure, that they’re going to experience joy,” Torgerson-White said. “That’s our hypothesis.”

To recruit their avian volunteers, Prasad-Shreckengast and her colleague, Jenna Holakovsky, worked methodically. They started last fall by spending a few days just sitting in the chicken pen, before opening the door to the hallway where the experiment would eventually take place.

Then, they began adding elements of the experimental infrastructure — a window screen, a piece of plywood — and doling out food pellets to any birds brave enough to approach. After about three weeks, they had the entire experimental arena set up and 13 birds who regularly chose to enter it, becoming their volunteer chicken corps.

The researchers offered some of these chickens an opportunity to learn something new — how to knock a lid off a bowl — and assessed their overall emotional states, using what is known as a judgment bias test. The test involved measuring how quickly the chickens approached a mysterious bowl and its unknown contents.

The theory was that a chicken in a generally positive mood would be more likely to assume that the bowl contained something good, like food, and would stride toward it more quickly than a down-in-the-dumps chicken would.

So far, the researchers have tested eight chickens, half of whom were in the control group, and it is too early to draw firm conclusions about chickenkind.

(The original group of recruits dwindled after one bird died, another failed to meet the study criteria, and three others dropped out — in one case, to spend time in the nest box instead. “I think she really just was highly motivated to sit on some eggs,” Prasad-Shreckengast said.)

But the preliminary data suggest that learning did seem to boost the mood of some of the birds.

Then there was Yoshi, who had tried to bypass the learning challenge altogether.

Instead of completing the task for her reward, she went straight for the food, trying to hop over the intervening window screen. Although Yoshi did eventually deign to complete the task, she did not seem to enjoy the experience. She probably found it frustrating, Torgerson-White said.