Short Wave - Peep The Delightful Science Of Chickens

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

When Tove Danovich decided to dabble in backyard chicken keeping, she embraced a tried and true journalistic practice — reading everything there is to find on the subject. In her search, she found plenty of how-to guides, but what she really wanted was to know more about the science. She wanted to understand their evolution and unique relationship with humans. "As I was reading more and as I was wanting this book that increasingly it seemed like it it just didn't exist. I wound up writing it instead," says Tove. Today, Aaron visits Tove in her chicken coop to talk about her recent book Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them and to meet the chicken stars of Tove's Instagram account.Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Know of a new book we should feature on Short Wave? Drop us a line at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Yes, we're just in the new coop. Hey there, shortwavers. Today, we are coming to you from, I'm going to Mike, some chickens. Well, you can probably tell. We are standing in the run of my chicken coop in my home near Portland, and there are eight very fancy chicken ladies,

all kind of milling around our food. feet and being upset that I haven't let them outside yet today. Do you want to introduce yourself? I'm Tova Danovich. I'm a journalist and a chicken keeper and the author of Under the Hen Fluence Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the people who love them. Hi girls. Oh my God, they're beautiful. It's just fine. You get really addicted. You want to have one of everything.

So I like having them in all shapes and colors. These ladies, Rose and Blanch are the two newest. Oh, and this one just hopped onto a little trapeze? To a swing, yeah, the chicken swing. That's Emmylou. Like a lot of chicken curious folks, Tova started out with just a couple hens because she wanted the fresh eggs. But that snowballed to eight hens and an Instagram account, of which Emmylou is the star. She didn't just hop on swings either. She also likes to hop on the shoulder bags of radio reporters as they kneel to record hen talk.

Do I have a chicken on me? Anything Emmilu does, she literally, I posted a video of her just drinking rainwater the other day, and I think it has like 6 million views. She's a adorable. I know. Chickens. Yes, chickens. Tova became so enthralled that she decided to write a book about them.

I'm a journalist, so when I get into any subject, the first thing I do is I read everything I can find about it. And what I found is that even though there are a million how-to guides about it, raising chickens. There just isn't a lot about them as a species and our relationship. So as I was reading more and as I was wanting this book that increasingly it seemed like it just didn't exist, I wound up writing it instead, which I think is how a lot of books happen. So today on the show, we get under the hen fluence with Tova Danovitch. She takes us through the science of chickens, their evolution, their smart little foul minds, and the weird role they've been. played in the history of animal training. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave,

the science cluckcast from NPR. To begin, I'd love it, actually, if you would take us through that evolutionary history of the chicken. Yeah, so chickens like all birds are descended from dinosaurs, one way or another. And eventually, this branch broke off into the gales genus, which consists of a few different types of jungle fowl. Scientists discovered when they sequenced the chicken genome back in 2004 that most chickens are descended from the red jungle fowl, which was then domesticated by humans. And that domestication, can you tell us a little bit about what we know about when and where it began?

The current estimates for chicken domestication, the best guess, is about 3,500 years ago. And most people think that they were actually domesticated not for food, but for cockfighting, and also their role in religious rituals and as sacrifices. So eventually, when people were keeping these fighting cocks, they discovered that the hens also lay these eggs that are really nice for eating. And then when you had a hen that was too old or a rooster that couldn't fight, they would become dinner. You write in your book that the domesticated chicken, as we know it now, is a thoroughly, human invention? Would you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that? That's correct. So the red jungle fowl, if you look at the egg laying, they lay eggs seasonally and only about 15 eggs a year. The chickens that are raised on farms for egg productions lay about 300. That's a huge shift. And even

only in the 1950s, they were laying about 150 eggs a year. So we have really maximized these birds for production on the meat side. It's a similar story where today's broiler chickens, which are usually owned by a company and have names like Cobb 500, those birds grow to slaughter weight, which is about six pounds in six weeks. Sounds like they would basically collapse under their own weight if they just kept going. They do. There are some, you know, farm sanctuaries or people that try to keep these birds alive. And the only way to do it is by keeping them on a diet. And that's actually what they have to do with the breeding birds that they need to stay alive long enough to become mature enough to make the next generation of birds. So we have basically completely asserted evolution to create a thing that can't actually reproduce without our assistance.

That is true, certainly in the case of the broilers. The laying hens are a little bit better off, though, interestingly, they're the more inbred bird. I was just reading recently that most of the commercial laying hens are about 90% related to each other, which is absolutely wild. And terrible should some sort of pathogen be introduced that they can't fight off. And suddenly all of our chickens, I mean, I guess actually we saw that this year with bird flu. I think that we lost lots and lots of birds. Yeah, avian flu is a perfect example. So far, I think we're up to 58 million of them that have been killed because of it.

of avian flu. Wow. To switch gears to something a little bit more positive. I'd love to talk about chicken intelligence. I mean, they are a maligned animal birds that we've got bird-brained. We have chicken-hearted. And yet you write a lot about how they're actually pretty smart. Would you peck apart the science for us a little bit? I would love to peck apart the science. I think a wonderful thing about chickens like most animals is the more you study them, the smarter you find out they are. I mean, chickens may not be good at physics or art, but they are incredibly good at being chickens. They're flock animals, so a lot of their smarts have to do with communication. Chickens have at least 24 different noises that they make that all refer to specific things.

So they have one alarm call that they use for ground predators and another one for something coming from the sky. So they know where to look and also how best to hide. One of the things that people have studied is roosters for their role as flock protectors. If there's another male around where they know that's another target for a potential predator, they are more likely to do a loud sustained alarm call than if they're all on their lonesome. And you write also that some of those calls they're learned. Yeah, they definitely are learned. I mean, chickens are social animals.

They learn from the other chickens around them, which is really cool because it shows that chickens have a version of culture, essentially, that they pass down from one generation to the next. And you do write about chicken camp and the act of training chickens. Would you introduce us to this? Chicken training camp is the most delightful thing I've ever witnessed. I got to go to a camp where people were clicker training chickens to do obstacle courses, much in the same way that people clicker trained dogs for obedience. Which is literally like the little clicker that's like, whenever they do the thing correctly.

Exactly. Yeah. It helps mark a specific behavior, which can be really helpful with animals like birds who really don't care about your approval. in the way that our dogs do. So these people, they taught them to do a match to sample exercise where essentially they hold up a green triangle and a red square and the chicken has to peck at the photo that matches to the thing the trainer is holding up. And they did it.

And I think the most exciting thing about that was that you really see the chickens trying to think about what they're doing. This wasn't a task that just came easily to. them, but they stopped and thought and wanted to do the best they could to get the most treats. And yet at the same point, you do write about how chickens have a starring role in kind of the history of animal training. Yeah, it kind of goes back a little bit to BF Skinner. BF Skinner being a very well-known behavioral psychologist, correct? That's correct. Yeah, when we hear people talk about positive and negative reinforcement,

that is B.F. Skinner's research. And he, during wartime with two of his grad students, Marion and Keller Breeland, decided to embark on this kind of strange project of training pigeons to drop bombs that were more targeted. This never wound up working out. But during a lot of their downtime, these behaviorists were figuring out how to train other animals. You know, what tricks could they get them to do? And so the Breelans, when they stopped working with BF Skinner, went on to start a training company of their own. And many people that they taught how to train these animals to do tricks went on to do a number of other things, which some of them are great, like reforming how training worked in Hollywood. Before these people came around, animal training was not a pleasant world. There was a lot of just punishment. And so having reward-based training, breaking these steps down into little pieces, was really pretty revolutionary at the time. And what role did chickens play in it? I think that they at first couldn't get much attention until they started a chicken show. The Breeland's first idea was they really

wanted to train dogs and no one was very interested at the time. And so they hooked up with a Feed Company called Lero Feed to do these chicken shows. So they would bring in a bunch of chickens and train them to do various things. In one act, they actually had a number of baby chicks that would climb up, eat some food, and slide down a slide, and do this over and over, or have chickens that played tic-tac-toe against people. And one, right? And one. And all of these became a way for the feed company to sell more food and get people to their booth.

And so being able to train animals to do these really small tricks, to do shows for crowds became super popular really quickly. What's the most valuable thing that your chickens have taught you? I think chickens really teach you to relax in a way that other animals don't. I have two dogs. I love my dogs. They're wonderful. But they require a lot from you and they rely on you. But the chickens are just busy doing chicken stuff. And I really like sitting in the yard with them and just watching them be chickens. It's delightful.

The little sounds they make are just supremely relaxing. I think we should all be listening to chickens for meditation music. So chicken ASMR. I'm going to guess there's actually probably a channel for that out there somewhere. I should start it if not. It's been just a delight to talk. Chickens with you. It's been excellent.

Thank you. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and Liz Metzger, edited by managing producer Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Britt Hansen. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is the senior director of programming, and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming.

I'm Aaron Scott, and I'll just keep crowing here, till the sun comes up.