Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency' More Info: Light-hearted article in Times Higher Education. Co-authored with Edie, Dolly, Gertie and Fl

Lennox, Peter

English

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency'\ud
More Info: Light-hearted article in Times Higher Education. Co-authored with Edie, Dolly, Gertie and Fl

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Pecking Order

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency' More Info: Light-hearted article in Times Higher Education. Co-authored with Edie, Dolly, Gertie and FloPeter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency'
More Info: Light-hearted article in Times Higher Education. Co-authored with Edie, Dolly, Gertie and Fl

UDORA - University of Derby Online Research Archive

4 February 2010 Times Higher Education 4140 Times Higher Education 4 February 2010on what is being measured. I benefit fromeggs, mobile garden ornaments, endlessamusement and companionship; I even learnfrom them. My budding evil-scientist nine-year-old has learnt that evolution can go downas well as up, and that ground-feeding birdscan, over generations, get larger and lose theability to fly. He also discovered that riggingup a chicken catapult baited with corn canimprove individuals’ flying skills, but is notlikely to reverse the evolutionary trendand is very likely to get you into trouble. Fairenough: he also learnt to take care of themand understand their preferences andbehaviour; he teaches them things, and theypatiently go along with it as long as there’ssome tasty titbit as part of the deal.Put that way, keeping chickens is a lot moreefficient than driving to the supermarket foreggs of unknown heritage. Ours are greateggs with big golden-orange yolks that sitlike perfect hemispheres in the pan. Hardlysurprising, as these are gourmand chickens:they eat what we eat (chicken excepted, ofcourse). They like sweet corn, peas, pasta andrice. They love steak and cooked bacon rind.In the course of evolution, I don’t know wherechickens developed a taste for cooked pig.Maybe a freak accident: a bolt of lightning;a forest fire; an unfortunate pig… They alsolike prawns, salmon, cake and bread, andironically are rather partial to sage and onionstuffing. They are also fans of strawberries,raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, carrottops, cabbage leaves, grass, shoots – especiallythe ones you’ve just planted. And they turn allthis rather efficiently into eggs and excrement.Chickens don’t spend a lot of timetheorising about efficiency, or devising best-practice feeding strategies to maximiseresource utilisation, nutrition uptake andproduct throughput. But if you think humansinvented fast food, you should watch chickensdemolish a plate of cooked vegetable peelings.everything; the chicken’s future rested onbeing tasty. Chickens are thus relieved of anenormous responsibility, making their livessimpler. They don’t have to organise thewhole world, or attend meetings to discusspolicies “going forward”; they don’t have toinvent the future continually – it just comeswhen it comes.Chickens have hierarchies, of course,but not as high as Mount Everest,with the top cockerel sitting up in thestratosphere. They form small, manageablehierarchies and politics is a simple matter:“When I come into contact with anotherchicken, what is our relative status?” Thelower-status chicken moves away, ceding themorsel of food or best perching place. If theyare of a similar status, they have to fight itout. The chicken at the bottom of the peckingorder always has to let everyone else eat first,or must run in to steal and risk being viciouslypecked. (Even the nice, docile, mild-mannered,fat old brown hen will throw a jab at the poorbottom-of-the-ladder chicken; bullying isn’tjust the property of a single bully.)As a chicken, you don’t have to betteryourself; you just need to find your place.A chicken doesn’t have to be ambitious, orworry about realising its potential and gettingon in life.Is a chicken’s life somehow less fulfilling,then? Is it anthropomorphic to say that hensfind life more or less interesting? I’m toldthat battery farming isn’t too bad because thechickens don’t know any better (and it’s notfor long, anyhow); you can’t miss what younever knew existed – the convenient conceptof tabula rasa again. I’m sorry, but I can spota happy chicken a mile off. Anyone who everlived with chickens about the place wouldn’tspout such rubbish.From close, if hardly scientific, observation,I can report:Are they silly, fussy, defenceless creatures?For a worm, woodlouse or a small frog, theyare huge, fast and efficient predators. It alldepends on your point of view.What’s life like to a chicken? Does theworld look similar to them as it does to me?Is their green, with apologies to RichardGregory, the same as mine? Is a chicken’s lifesimpler than mine? More fun? More or lessfulfilling?It depends which chicken. For a chicken“in the wild” (are there any now?), life may beinteresting, exciting and quite short. Fora battery hen, it’s stressful yet boring, anddefinitely short: a year of gainful employmentas an egg factory, then redundancy (death).A chicken bred for eating would have anuninteresting life of 12 to 20 weeks.For a free-range hen, it’s probably quitenice, peaceful, interesting even. For a pet hen,complete with a name, it’s a cosseted life:guaranteed food and water, protection frompredators, plenty of space, time to relax, theopportunity to spread your wings, take a dustbath, sunbathe a little, explore a bit, look fora hole in the fence, raid the vegetable garden,go and watch the funny humans with theirendless activity for activity’s sake.But it’s really out of your hands (claws)which kind of chicken you are, miserableand short-lived or lucky and long-lived. In thelottery of evolutionary niches, some speciesgot to be fast, powerful and sharp. Humansgot the mental wherewithal to try to controlMy budding evil-scientist sondiscovered that rigging up a chickencatapult baited with corn can improveindividuals’ flying skills, but is not likelyto reverse the evolutionary trendPeter Lennox keepschickens, and they havetaught him a great dealabout behaviour, ethics,evolution and thepsychopathic nature ofmodern ‘efficiency’PeckingorderOFF PISTEAfortnightlyseriesinwhichacademicsstepoutsidetheirareaof expertiseAll chickens are not born equal. If a few morephilosophers had had a little more empiricalinteraction with chickens, John Locke mayhave reconsidered his notion of tabula rasa, theidea of the incipient individual as a blank slateembarking on a course of self-authorship.Chickens are born with certain personality traits,and these endure in a remarkably stable fashionthroughout their lifespans (which can be as long as15 years).Of course, chickens are not born mentally fullyformed – you can watch them learn by discovery,doing, copying and sometimes even adapting andimproving. Eventually, older ones end up teachingyounger ones. You don’t see that in the batteryfarm, but put some in the garden and you soondo.Watching chickens is a very old human pastime,and the forerunner of psychology, sociology andmanagement theory. Sometimes understandingyourself can be made easier by projection on toothers. Watching chickens helps us understandhuman motivations and interactions, which isdoubtless why so many words and phrases incommon parlance are redolent of the hen yard:“pecking order”, “cockiness”, “rufflingsomebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody underyour wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”,“strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clippingsomeone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “tocrow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming hometo roost”, “don’t count your chickens beforethey’re hatched”, “nest eggs”, “preening”.You’ll even see that the boss cockerel tends totake possession of the highest point – the top ofthe heap. And the longer you watch chickens, themore you think of them as people rather thansome strange alien species with feathers, beadyeyes and a strange language. Squint a little as youwatch them enact their various roles, and you cansee a brood of Sainsbury’s retail managersjockeying to maintain position.Keeping chickens may not be the most efficientway to source eggs, of course, but then it depends4 February 2010 Times Higher Education 4342 Times Higher Education 4 February 2010Gag reflexHow real is the threat tofreedom of speech inacademia?Heightened sensesGeologist Mike Petterson’seureka moments in ruggedLakeland and war-tornKabulHandling stolen goodsIntellectual property piratespatrol the academic, creativeand industrial high seasBook of the weekTara Brabazon on JaronLanier’s You Are Not aGadgetwww.timeshighereducation.co.ukNEXT WEEKchopping block looking for tasty woodlice.They follow me into the shed and back outinto the garage, through the side gate, trippingme up every time I turn, all the whilemurmuring and clucking softly. I think theymay be reassuring me so I don’t get spooked.I’ve not heard of a functional magneticresonance imaging study of mirror neuronsin hens, but they do learn by copying eachother. One hen makes a special, ungainly jumpto get at the out-of-reach juicy berries – verycomical. By the end of the week, they’re allat it until the berries are gone. Next year,the technique is deployed straight away.It’s the same with finding out how to getover the fence in stages; a low wall, then onto the shed roof, along a bit then a short flightand a crash-landing in next door’s garden.Once one does it, most of them can; the escaperoute will have to be sealed.If you allow a mother hen to hatch somechicks (and not all hens are equally good atthis – some just forget the eggs!), theysuddenly develop a whole new vocabulary,teaching the chicks how to peck, scratchthe ground and so on. Mother hens fussendlessly; the chicks, initially clueless, learnrapidly. Chicks that have been reared in anincubator, without a mother hen, seem a lotmore clueless for a lot longer.Hens that have lived the first year of theirlife in commercial intensive-farm environmentsare amazingly clueless when introduced to mygarden. Sometimes they won’t come out of thehen-house for the first day or two, even withcompetition offers the greatest efficiencyshould be made to watch chickens.They have clear attitudes to territory (that’swhat a pecking order is all about, after all).They chase away pigeons; they also sometimesgang up on our collie dog. If a cat comes intothe garden, they complain vociferously untilI arrive to shoo it away; it’s the same if afox calls by at night to test my securityarrangements.Sometimes, if there’s no cockerel, a bossierhen will assume the role, even being thefirst to leap to the defence of the brood atgreat personal risk. If a cockerel issubsequently introduced, a period ofadjustment to the pecking order follows.A good cockerel enjoys droit de seigneur(frequently) but is a fierce and brave protectorof the flock, putting himself between threatand the hens, defending to the death ifnecessary. When tasty food is served hewaits courteously for the hens to have theirfill. A diffident cockerel is cold-shoulderedby the hens.Personality traits and behaviourSome little groups stick together quite closely,while other individuals are more independentand go off by themselves.Some breeds are flighty and nervouswhile others are calm, placid even. Some areaggressive and stroppy, yet occasionally theplacid ones gang up on them and see themoff. Smaller breeds like to roost and fly moreoften. Some breeds are more adventurous thanothers, some are less intelligent, some can bevery tame, and others will never quite be.When we have several breeds, they tend tohang out with their own kind.Inquisitiveness, teaching and learningIf I’m working in the garden, the chickenscome, sit on the wall and watch. If I’mchopping logs, the tamer ones have adisconcerting tendency to hop on to theChickens’ environmental preferences andterritorialityThey complain if I don’t get up and let themout of the hen-house soon after dawn. Theycome and nag vociferously, even tapping onthe back door, if they don’t have enough water.Chickens are quite good at manipulatinghumans.They spend a lot of time wandering aroundin the undergrowth, good for scratching upmoss. They like a little sunbathing in theafternoon, weather permitting. They shelterfrom the rain and really, really don’t like snowon the ground, standing on one leg by theback door and plaintively calling to be letinto the house.They like a handful of corn in the foodhopper, but prefer to wander around peckingit. If I throw bread out, they spend a lot oftime chasing each other, stealing bits fromeach other’s beaks. Then they run off to tryto consume it in peace. If they see anotherhen pick up a nice piece, they’ll drop theirown and chase after that one.Sometimes a truce emerges; they competevigorously until they’ve each got a decentpiece, whereupon they scatter, going off a littleway to consume it without having to defend itat every instant. But the truce can be upset bythe arrival of a very competitive bird. Likeuncooperative drivers in a traffic jam, they alldash for the advantage and end up worse off;the whole activity takes more effort and time.Economic and management theoristssubscribing to the view that unbridledthe open door right in front of them. Theydon’t know how to roost, and instead sit allnight (and day) on the floor. Once they do getout, they don’t know how to scratch and peck.However, once hens have become used to theoutdoor life and the freedom of the garden, ifthey are left shut in the compartment (which isoutdoors, with plenty of food and water), theyvociferously march up and down the fence ortry repeatedly to fly over.Now, I’ve hardly done much to refutecharges of anthropomorphism – but amI bovvered? I’m not projecting humancharacteristics on to dumb animals – I’msaying I really don’t see that much differencein their hopes and fears, behaviour and pettyfoibles. If one actually lives with chickens, it’sa lot harder to treat them as mere objects.Their preferences are astoundingly obvious,so what possible excuse could there be forgiving them any less? If they like greens, whygive them pellets? If they like sunbathing, whypack them into a tiny, noisy, smelly place withno natural light? If, as I suspect, the answeris something to do with the “efficiency” offood production, then the notion of efficiencyis horrible, incompetent, brutalised andbrutalising, and it’s certainly not in theinterests of chickens at all. And I’m not surethat our ethical notions are all that moreadvanced than chickens’.Alright, we could argue that they’re onlychickens, not people, and frankly, we’re thetop species so we call the shots – that’sevolution, we’re the winners and might makesright. So our notions of ethics extend onlyto “like me”? But how like is “like”? In thegrand scheme of things, if we stand back andconsider all the matter and energy we knowof in the universe, we’re a lot more similarto chickens than we are to almost everythingelse – all that rock and water, those suns, theendlessness of space and dark matter. Chickensare positively family.Efficiency, competitiveness: in today’seconomic climate, these are the guidingprinciples of business, of life; more productfaster, while taking up less space. But are theseconcepts in our interests at all? Efficiencywithout ethics is psychopathic. And how muchcleverer than chickens are we, ultimately?So what do I get from chickens? Simplelessons like these: competition withoutco-operation is nonsense; you can’t winby simply eradicating all the opposition –that’s a pyrrhic victory. In life, winning reallyisn’t everything – it isn’t even anything. Takingpart is all.Reward and risk go hand in hand. The topcockerel has to take the biggest share of both.A flock can manage without a cockerel, but acockerel without a flock is nothing.A flock can keep you warm, inform youabout dangers and advantages, and provideyou with companionship; but you have towork at it.Everyone should have a place in thepecking order. Strive for your place in life,not someone else’s. Someone else’s bread isn’tnecessarily tastier than your own. Envy willcost you dearly.Don’t let “flock-think” smother yourown opinions; give yourself space to be anindividual. Common sense is useful, but it’snot always right. The society you’re in mayprompt you to behave badly, but only youcan change that.One could spend years on a moral philo-sophical quest, or keep chickens and treatthem with courtesy and common sense. Onedoesn’t just keep chickens, one lives withthem. All chickens are not born equal, butthey deserve equal respect.Peter Lennox is senior lecturer in spatialperception in artificial environments anddirector of the Signal Processing andApplications Group, University of Derby.In the lottery of evolution, somespecies got to be fast and powerful.Humans got the mental wherewithal totry to control everything; the chicken’sfuture rested on being tastyWe’re a lot more similar to chickensthan we are to almost everything else– all that rock and water, those suns,the endlessness of space and darkmatter. Chickens are positively family

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Pecking Order

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