What's The "Smartest" Thing You've Seen a Chicken Do?

I love this thread - may it never go away

My contribution is small.... I've been throwing bits of food from one end of the run to the other, making the chickens run to work off some beans. Dixie, our star chicken, figured out that she could just stand in front of me and get pieces that either fell or came her way because of her sheer irresistibleness.

They are very good at communicating. When I try to move them around in the coop for less night squabbles, our big hen will get tired of me doing that and just touch my arm with her beak. Clear as speaking she's telling me they can handle it, thank you. Chicken are so cool

I love this thread, too.

One of my BOs does the same thing as Dixie, and she has trained me to give her treats individually when the others are running around pecking up morsels.

They can be very motivated to communicate with their humans. My other BO will follow me around when free ranging and give me a little peck to remind me she is ready to accept treats.

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The breeds are RIR, BR BO, EE, SSand Polish. And the smartest thing I have seen any of them do is breath.

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The breeds are RIR, BR BO, EE, SSand Polish. And the smartest thing I have seen any of them do is breath.

And poop!

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The breeds are RIR, BR BO, EE, SSand Polish. And the smartest thing I have seen any of them do is breath.

And poop!

And lots of it.

Yes, lots and lots of poop. Well chickens are not exactly brilliant animals. They are not as smart as other birds even, like parrots and crows. Some crows have actually been documented using tools and problem solving in experiments. But I do think that chickens are smarter than a lot of people think they are. I wonder if some breeds tend to be smarter than other breeds. Yet those videos links above showing trained chickens, the chickens are typical leg horn hens I think.


Animal intelligence studies interest me. That is why I keep coming back to this thread.

Chickens can see kind of smart one minute and then act like they have completely forgotten how to get out of the run the next minute. Or perhaps they just ignore the door when what they want is just outside the run's wire opposite the door. That got me thinking and I googled "chicken maze." Some one actually referred to a study:

"In other research the learning capabilities of chickens was demonstrated in tests where chickens where able to learn tasks such as opening doors and finding their way through mazes with speeds which are usually only expected of horses or dogs."

I was actually kind of surprised, so even I can underestimate how smart a chicken can be.

I was looking on the web for studies of chicken intelligence but came across a story of an octopus:


We went to Sea World in San Diego and got to see the back rooms ( I have a naturalist friend who writes scientific papers for Sea World) One of the other workers told me this story:
Sea World had a tankful of very large and expensive saltwater tropical
fish. They were having problems with fish disappearing – and these were
pricey fish, so naturally they were worried. This pattern continued for a
while – every so often a fish would disappear without a trace from the
tank. No remains, no nothing.
They concluded that one of the aquarium
staff was stealing the fish after hours and selling them to pet stores or
maybe private buyers. But they had no way of figuring out who, and they
didn’t want to levy random accusations, so they decided to set up a hidden
camera to catch the thief in the act.
A few days later the culprit was revealed. Opposite that saltwater tank
was another saltwater tank, wherein lived an octopus. This fellow would
wait until it was late at night, crawl up the glass and out of his tank,
open up the latch to the cover, down across the room to the fish tank, open the top, crawl in, catch a fish, bring it back to his tank and eat it there.

I marvel at our chickens' instinct. How do they know to lay their eggs in the nesting box? I never explained it to them, they didn't have any older chickens around. They peck and grumble at each other, but flock together if there's a threat.

The way chickens act is such a mix of instinct and learned behavior. Although nest box use is instinctual, I had to laugh when a another poster in this thread caught her pullets carefully watching the first layers in the young flock.