Text: The video ³Let¹s Ask the Animals,² produced by the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour in the United Kingdom, shows chickens learning which bowls contain food by watching television, learning to peck a button three times in order to obtain food, and learning how to navigate a complex obstacle course in order to get to a nesting box. € Chickens love to watch television and have vision similar to humans. They also seem to enjoy all forms of music, especially classical. € Chickens are able to learn by watching the mistakes of others and are very adept at teaching and learning. € Chickens also can learn to use switches and levers to change the temperature in their surroundings and to open doors to feeding areas. € Chickens have more than 30 distinct cries to communicate to one another, including separate alarm calls depending on whether a predator is traveling by land or sea. € A mother hen will turn her eggs as many as five times an hour and cluck to her unborn chicks, who will chirp back to her and to one another from within their shells! € Chickens navigate by the sun. € A hen will often go without food and water, if necessary, just to have a private nest in which to lay her eggs. € Like us, chickens form strong family ties and mourn when they lose a loved one. € Kim Sturla, who runs Animal Place, a sanctuary for abused and discarded farmed animals, has seen chickens empathize and show affection for one another. She recalls an endearing story about two elderly chickens who had been rescued from a city dump. ³Mary² and ³Notorious Boy² bonded and would roost on a picnic table together. One stormy night when the rain was really pelting down, Sturla went to put Mary and Notorious Boy in the barn and saw that ³the rooster had his wing extended over the hen protecting her.² AND THAT: Chickens raised for food in the U.S. are denied all their natural behaviors and desires. They are crammed by the tens of thousands into sheds that stink of ammonia fumes from accumulated waste; they are given barely enough room even to move (each bird lives in the amount of space equivalent to a standard sheet of paper). They routinely suffer broken bones from being bred to be top heavy, from callous handling (workers roughly grab birds by their legs and stuff them into crates), and from being shackled upside-down at slaughterhouses. Chickens are often still fully conscious when their throats are slit or when they are dumped into tanks of scalding hot water to remove their feathers. When they¹re killed, chickens are still babies, not yet 2 months old, out of a natural life span of 10 to 15 years. The average American meat-eater is responsible for the abuse and deaths of approximately 2,500 chickens.

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