Posted on 09/13/2002 8:13:42 AM PDT by dead
Chickens display signs of social intelligence and can navigate by the sun, Christine Nicol has revealed.
Her experiments at the University of Bristol showed that chickens were able to learn by watching the mistakes of others.
A group of "secretly trained" chickens were first taught that if they pecked a green or red button the right number of times they earned a food reward.
Another group of "student" chickens were allowed to watch the "demonstrator" chickens before trying to obtain the food themselves.
Professor Nicol found the students got a meal much faster after watching how the demonstrators performed before learning from their mistakes.
"They may be bird brains, but we need to redefine what we mean by bird brains," she told the British Association Festival of Science. "Chickens have shown us they can do things people didn't think they could do. There are hidden depths to chickens, definitely."
They appeared to learn faster from dominant chickens "at the top of the pecking order", she said. But cockerels took longer to learn the task than hens, and hens were bad at learning from cockerels. It was not clear why they seemed to ignore lessons from a male.
Other studies showed that chickens, like other birds, navigate by the sun while searching for food in a maze. "When people ask why did the chicken cross the road, we say we don't know but it might have been navigating by the sun," Professor Nicol said.
Chickens owed their navigation skills to their relatives, jungle fowl.
Press Association
Dims are already workin on it! ;o)
The new Al Qaeda.
I'm not going to make a sexist comment here. I'm not going to make a sexist comment here. I'm not . . .
And I always found i got my meal much faster when popping over to KFC.
I wonder if she had Chris Berman, Chris Mortenson or Sterling Sharpe for freshman year chickenology?
Ha! Goot one!
That has been my experience too.
"Are you going to listen to me and save yourself some pain, suffering, and embarrassment, or will it be business as usual?"
I am always wrong until she proves me right -- the hard way.
They owe a debt of gratitude to cousin Icarus.
So lets see, it takes longer for men to learn things, and women are bad at learning from men and seem to ignore the lessons of men.... Sounds like this behavior may be universally constant among all species :) Lord knows my wife ignores me constantly.
That's nothing. Democrats actually have their own parallel universe.
There's got to be a Larson cartoon.
...where they can fly, because gravity has been cut by two-thirds.
Mein Gott! I'm channelling the recently departed!
:^)
They're just showing the armadillo that it can be done.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.