Chicks can count

Jonathan Webb reports for BBC News:

Baby chickens have left-right number bias like humans, say researchers 

Scientists in Italy have found that baby chickens associate low and high numbers with left and right, respectively - just like humans.

In a series of experiments, 60 newborn chicks were shown patterns of shapes representing different numbers, before choosing a direction.

Humans are known to use a "mental number line" to think about quantities but this innate left-right association has not been seen in animals before.

The work appears in Science magazine.

Dr Rossa Rugani, who led the experiments at the University of Padova, said it was impossible to know exactly what drove the chicks' choices - but the results were clear.

"All we can judge is behavioural responses. Therefore, we don't actually know if it is a real 'number line' but it strongly resembles what is observed in the human number line," she told BBC News.
Humans show very consistent associations between spatial locations and numbers, but it is unclear how much of this develops automatically and how much we learn.

At seven months of age, babies prefer arrangements that increase from left to right. Adults show a bias whereby we respond to large numbers faster with our right hand, and smaller numbers faster with our left.

But that bias is reversed in adults who were educated in Arabic, which reads from right to left. So does education produce this bias, or just decide its direction?

Ancient origin Because we can test their behaviour very soon after hatching, chicks are "a preferred model to study the foundation of cognitive abilities" Dr Rugani explained.

She and her colleagues designed their experiments to find out whether these young creatures, only distantly related to humans, also link smaller and bigger numbers with different spatial locations.

They trained each of the three-day-old animals to retrieve food from behind a sign, displaying a number of shapes.

Then the chick was offered two copies of a different number, and the researchers counted how many times each animal chose the left- or right-hand option.

If the new number was smaller than the training number, the fluffy subjects went left about 70% of the time; similarly, they went to the right 70% of the time if the new number was larger.

Just as has been shown in human studies, the effect was relative: chicks went to the right when shown "eight" if the initial "target" number was five - but when "eight" was preceded by a target of 20, they tended to go to the left.

In further experiments, the team tweaked the presentation of the numbers and found that the trend was the same even when the smaller number was presented using larger shapes, different colours, and so on.

If it was higher than the previous number they had seen, chicks associated a new number with the right

Dr Rugani argues that her results, showing persistent left-right trends in baby birds, suggest an ancient evolutionary origin for our "mental number line".

Rather than picking up such biases as a product of our culture and education, we may have evolved these tendencies a very long time ago.

They may even have an origin in the physical arrangement of our brains, the team suggests.

Humans and animals do not have perfectly symmetrical brains and some functions are also biased to one side or the other - for example, a process called "pseudoneglect" means we pay slightly more attention to objects in the left side of space than the right. This has been proposed as an explanation for why we often start counting a series of objects with the one on the far left.

Dora Biro, an associate professor of animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, told the BBC the new results were compelling.

"It certainly seems to push back the evolutionary origins of number-space mapping... to well beyond hominids," Dr Biro said.

She added that it will be interesting to see whether the left-right association can be re-trained in the same way that it can in people - or whether the animals' brains are more hard-wired to map numbers onto space in this particular orientation.

10 years with chickens

Backyard Poultry magazine editor Ryan Slabaugh asked me to write some thoughts on the occasion of the magazine's tenth anniversary.  It was a good occasion to reflect on how Americans have changed their relationship with chickens over the past decade. Here's what I wrote:

When I wrote my first book, How to Raise Chickens, in 2007, I was excited about chickens. But as I told people about it, they didn’t react with the same enthusiasm. “Chickens?’ they would say. “Is it a cookbook?”

The idea of keeping a small flock in the backyard was unusual, even quirky. Now, every person I talk to is either raising their own or knows someone who is. It’s been a revolution in livestock. The chicken, little considered except on our plates, rose up and arrived in public consciousness as the mascot of the Local Food Movement.

The concept of food miles entered the conversation, and carbon footprint. Both are ways of weighing the environmental impact of food. Fresh eggs from a backyard flock is as local as you can get!

Editor Elaine Belanger’s initial expectations for a magazine about backyard poultry flocks were modest.  I was excited, with my first book about chickens set to be published. Backyard Poultry’s first issues sold so quickly that it was clear she was on to a good idea. How to Raise Chickens sold well. In 2009, How to Raise Poultry, going beyond chickens to ducks, geese, turkeys, guineafowl and other fowl, was in readers’ eager hands. Chickens were suddenly hot.

Chickens in family life have come a long way since I got involved in the 1980s. My daughter persuaded me to buy some chicks at the feed store. Growing up in the suburbs didn’t prepare me for raising poultry. They started life in a plastic laundry basket in our living room, and we were launched. Soon friends were confiding, “I’ve always wanted to have chickens.”

At that time, there simply weren’t any books about backyard flocks, or much about heritage breeds. The American Poultry Association was active in 4-H, county fairs and other exhibition venues, but my background didn’t cross their path. As the chickens grew, I saw the need for a book. Eventually, I wrote it.

Backyard Poultry magazine was a welcome partner. I would have welcomed it back when I started! It has filled that role for many eager beginners since.

Those first chicks my daughter and I got introduced me to the idea of chickens as domestic birds, but they also introduced us to the world of heritage chicken breeds, poultry shows and poultry meat and egg production.

The Local Food Movement was picking up speed. Consumers were peeking behind the curtain of secrecy drawn by corporate agriculture on how crops and animals are raised. What we saw wasn’t pretty. High levels of chemicals on crops and fed to food animals, disgusting living conditions for the animals and exploitation of laborers. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma in was published in 2006, picking up on the growing interest in how food is raised and how it gets to our tables. Although the conditions of livestock were awful, not everyone was willing to become a vegetarian. Backyard and small flock raising offered a middle path. Humane treatment, clean conditions, and voila! Better tasting food.

The increase in small flock poultry raising for production has inspired the APA to revive its Flock Inspection Program. The APA performed this service back in the 1950s, but the program lost ground as corporate industrial flocks dominated the market. In the past ten years, small poultry producers have found there are always more buyers than their small flocks can satisfy. Standard breed producers want to sell to consumers who appreciate their products. The APA is revamping its program for APA-certified judges to inspect flocks and award them APA Certification. Soon consumers will be able to buy Standard Barred Rock, Rhode Island Red or any other Standard breed a producer cares to raise.

Many remarkable people have come into my life during the Decade of Chickens. One is Frank Reese, an advocate for heritage poultry from his Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in Kansas. He’s seen his sales of chickens and turkeys go from a few thousand to tens of thousands in the past ten years. He mentors other farmers to raise poultry to his high standards.

Frank Reese and some of his turkeys

He’s raising awareness of how modern commercial broilers have been bred to grow fast, beyond their physical capacity to support themselves and be healthy.

Temple Grandin, an authority on cattle behavior, turned her attention to industrial poultry in her Animals Make Us Human, published in 2009. “Chicken welfare is so poor that I can’t talk only about the core emotions in this chapter. I have to talk about chickens’ physical welfare as well.”

Temple Grandin and friends

Growing awareness led to laws banning the worst of crowded industrial chicken cages. California led the way with a proposition approved by voters in 2008, followed by a law from the legislature. Industrial poultry welfare – California also banned foie gras because it requires force-feeding ducks and geese -- will continue to rouse controversy, but small flock raising has changed the conversation in the last decade.

Backyard chickens have become popular enough for hatcheries to develop hybrids targeted to the backyarder, but heritage breeds remain the best choice for small flocks. Heritage breeds have demonstrated their ability to adapt to local conditions and reproduce naturally. They are vigorous and long-lived. The most humane living conditions won’t help birds that have lost their innate natural behaviors.

“This is why it’s important to preserve the old breeds of animals and poultry,” Dr. Grandin writes. “Keeping the classic breeds alive is the only way to preserve genetic diversity and to save animals that have valuable genetic traits breeders may want to breed back into commercial lines in the future….Fortunately, many of the older breeds of poultry and livestock are being raised by local farmers and sold in farmers’ markets or to gourmet restaurants. If a serious disease ever kills commercial broilers or layers, the entire world will be thanking the small producers and hobbyists who have kept the old breeds of chickens from becoming extinct.”

We’re all beginners in some sense. I learn something about poultry every day. Heritage breeds connect your backyard flock with the past and the future. Dominiques are the first American breed and Dorkings date back to the Roman conquest of Britain.

Jim Ward's lovely Dominique rooster

The next step in that history has catapulted chickens into family life in the past decade.  Issues that weren’t even on the radar ten years ago are now in people’s backyards, on their tongues and debated in houses of government. Backyard Poultry magazine has been part of our expanding involvement with chickens and other poultry. The changes have been so amazing that they have given me hope that other changes will open opportunities in the next ten years.

Backyard news

Little Pixie so enjoyed her dirt bath yesterday. I couldn't resist taking a

Pixie rolled happily in the soft dirt.

picture of her.



Ms. Ancona's comb has fully recovered from her winter molting droop. She's now laying again and feeling fine.

As she was growing up and her comb started developing, my husband was concerned that we had another rooster.  He is convinced now that she is a hen.

Left to right, Blue Laced Red Wyandotte, Ms. Ancona with her lush, red comb.

Pixie's first egg

Pixie, a Peruvian basket chicken, laid her first egg yesterday! It's a beauty, perfectly shaped, with a strong shell. It's small, but not as tiny as she is.

Marans egg and Pixie's first egg

This Marans pullet is a couple months younger than Pixie.

She is entirely black, with a purple sheen in the sunlight. She has muffs that give her face a fancy look. Her comb is a small rose comb. She has a strong personality and is often first to step up if a threat presents itself.

Pixie enjoys scratching in the oak leaf litter.

She struggled to join the flock, hatched in an incubator with her three brothers. They had to move to a farm in Vermont and she was devastated at losing their companionship. Her small size confused the other girls and her anxiety about her brothers interfered with a smooth transition into the flock.

Eventually, everyone got over all obstacles and she is now fully accepted. She enjoys roaming the yard and scratching for bugs. She loves it so much, that when I tempt the other girls back into the pen with an ear of fresh corn, she'd just as soon stay out, scratching.

Her unusual appearance and difficult life path have endeared her to me. Although I spent time holding her every day when she was a chick, she became suspicious of me after the mysterious disappearance of her brothers. She keeps her distance.

She is quite proud of her eggs. She laid a second one today, as perfect as the first. I haven't eaten one yet.

APA National

The American Poultry Association Ohio National Poultry Show in November brought out some amazing birds and their dedicated breeders. Jeannette Beranger, program manager for The Livestock Conservancy made this video of some of them.More photos are posted here.

Happy New Year! This is a good moment to reflect on the past year and look forward to new goals in 2015. I'll be writing a new book, a new version of the Field Guide to Chickens. I look forward to learning more about the many heritage standard breeds and those that are not recognized by the Standard but nevertheless play a role in family life.

I'm enjoying the two Marans pullets my Wyandotte hatched this past year. Thus far, their eggs are ranging from 4 to 7 on this chart, but one early egg was purple. One started out laying double yolk eggs,  but that has settled down. The adventure of chickens!

I'm asking around locally to locate people who need chickens, so that I can let my broody hens set and hatch chicks this year. My coop is full, so I can't keep any more, but I'm finding future homes for them.

Heritage Breeds podcasts

Jeannette Beranger, program manager for The Livestock Conservancy is making short podcasts about heritage breeds in general and chickens in particular. They're free and provide insights into why heritage breeds are important and how to improve your flock. 

This Fayoumi hen thrives in Egypt's hot, dry climate.

Conserving those heritage breeds is important, because those locally adapted breeds hold the genes that resist disease, tolerate extreme conditions such as drought, heat and cold. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is working to help local people maintain their herds and flocks of heritage breeds. Keeping heritage breeds makes you part of that history. 

Local breeds are the cornerstone of food production in rural countries. An egg a day is a significant addition to a poor child's diet.

Michelle Conrad's Russian Orloff is comfortable in the cold.

The Heritage Breeds podcast is brought to you by The Livestock Conservancy. In this podcast series you’ll meet the animals, breeders, and people working to save them from extinction. Visit HeritageBreeds.org to discover how you can get involved.

PROGRAMS 

Introduction to Heritage Breeds
Protecting nearly 200 breeds of livestock and poultry from extinction.

What are Heritage Breeds
Discover more about Heritage Breeds and which ones are considered to be the traditional livestock breeds that were raised by our forefathers. These are the breeds of a bygone era, before industrial agriculture became a mainstream practice. These...

Getting Started with Heritage Breeds
Choosing a breed to work with is often the most rewarding and fun part of getting involved with heritage breeds. Linking your own interests, abilities, and facilities with the needs and status of the breed is exciting. Making sure the...

Pickin' Chickens - Part 1 &Part 2
Gather the knowledge you need for Pickin’ Your Chickens. Heritage Breed Poultry expert Jeannette Beranger will introduce you to breeds from around the world. Discover more about the English, Continental, American, Asiatic, and Oriental...

Crevecoeurs

 Jeannette Beranger, research and technical programs manager for The Livestock Conservancy, has acquired Crevecoeurs! These show their pure bloodlines in their red rather than white ear lobes. The white ear lobes are evidence of Polish crosses.

How's this for a stylish pullet?

These young cockerels are growing out beautifully.

Jeannette says he's having a Bad Hair Day, but I wouldn't mention it to him.

These youngsters are active and enjoying their perch.

I reported on her project in August. This lovely group bodes well for 2015, and saving this historic breed.

Note the unusual V-shaped horn comb. Crevecoeurs share this shape comb with Houdans, Polish, La Fleche and Sultans.