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Zoology

Chicken

Publication Year

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Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology

Chickens Play To The Crowd, Cinzia Chiandetti Jan 2018

Chickens Play To The Crowd, Cinzia Chiandetti

Animal Sentience

The time was ripe for Marino’s review of chickens’ cognitive capacities. The research community, apart from expressing gratitude for Marino’s work, should now use it to increase public awareness of chickens’ abilities. People’s views on many animals are ill-informed. Scientists need to communicate and engage with the public about the relevance and societal implications of their findings.


Sentience Does Not Require “Higher” Cognition, Giorgio Vallortigara Jan 2017

Sentience Does Not Require “Higher” Cognition, Giorgio Vallortigara

Animal Sentience

I agree with Marino (2017a,b) that the cognitive capacities of chickens are likely to be the same as those of many others vertebrates. Also, data collected in the young of this precocial species provide rich information about how much cognition can be pre-wired and predisposed in the brain. However, evidence of advanced cognition — in chickens or any other organism — says little about sentience (i.e., feeling). We do not deny sentience in human beings who, because of cognitive deficits, would be incapable of exhibiting some of the cognitive feats of chickens. Moreover, complex problem solving, such as transitive inference, …


Are Chicken Minds Special?, Rafael Freire, Susan J. Hazel Jan 2017

Are Chicken Minds Special?, Rafael Freire, Susan J. Hazel

Animal Sentience

The number of publications on chicken cognition and emotion exceeds that on most birds and is comparable to the number of publications on some more “advanced” mammals. We argue that the chicken is an excellent model for this type of research because of (1) the presence of well-established fundamental mental processes in the chicken, (2) a challenging ethological environment and (3) social pressures that may have facilitated the evolution of cognitive abilities similar to those of some mammals. Marino’s (2017) review provides an excellent foundation for the continued study of complex mental abilities in this species.


Getting To The Other Side, Debra Merskin Jan 2017

Getting To The Other Side, Debra Merskin

Animal Sentience

Marino’s comprehensive, detailed, and timely review provides clear evidence of the sentience of chickens and strong support for those wishing to challenge their exclusion from even the limited protections currently accorded to animals grown for food.