Science: Togetherness in Chickens

Why does a chicken cross the road?

A scientific answer: it is probably seeking the company of other chickens, and if it is a young chicken, this sociability indicates that it was raised with other chickens around. These are the findings reported by University of Maine Psychologists Alan Baron and George B. Kish, who measured the effect of early isolation on chicken behavior. They hatched 30 chicks in a dark incubator. Ten chicks were then moved to individual cubicles, getting no chance to see one another. Ten more were cooped in pairs, and the remaining ten were kept together as a small, sociable flock.

After four weeks, the chickens were tested for sociability by putting them one by one in an apparatus that kept automatic track of how much time they spent near a "stimulus" chicken, separated from them by a partition of wire mesh. The chickens raised in a flock or in pairs showed intense togetherness, spending nearly all their time close to the other chickens. But the chickens raised in isolation fled to the far end of the cage.

After the first tests were completed, all the chickens were put in a single flock and kept together until they were ten weeks old. When they were cooped again in the togetherness tester, they all behaved pretty much alike toward the stimulus chicken on the other side of the wire. Baron and Kish conclude that chicks raised in isolation feel little attraction for their own kind, but after they have flocked together for six weeks, they learn to be as sociable as other chickens. Chickens are not much like humans, but Baron and Kish believe that their chicken study should bring cheer to parents of standoffish human young. If a child's withdrawnness comes from overprotection and isolation in his early years, he may be helped, as the chickens were, by being put in a flock where he can come to know and get along with his own kind.