Do Chickens Feel Sadness?

This is a polka dot, like the one in the story. This breed is technically known as the silver spangled hamburg.

by Andy

Once upon a time at the Land School there was a year when several chickens died. Some died when the fox came in the spring and some died due to old age and some died of a mysterious disease, but by the end of the winter we had decided to get some more baby chicks. We ordered 25 chicks of the exotic laying mix from the McMurray Hatchery and when they came we discovered that they had included an extra polka-dotted rooster chick. That was fine except that we also got another rooster chick on the same order, of the cochin type.

The polka dot rooster grew to be skinny and speedy, while the cochin rooster grew to be a monstrous fluffy heavy bird. Our polka dot would strut around and when people would have lunch outside, he would come over and jump on the deck and crow. He seemed to be saying that this was his area, but he never came any closer than the deck ledge and he would run away when we shooed him off. He was given the name of Mr. Sir, for his proud and dignified presence. Occasionally Mr. Sir and Louis, our cochin, would fight, but Louis was bigger and stronger and Mr. Sir would run away, because he was faster.

As the winner of the fights, Louis had won the right to mate with all the hens. However Mr. Sir had one polka dot hen who admired him and the two could always be seen together. He would show her the best wild food and then stand guard while she ate. One day she disappeared. We thought that maybe she had been killed by a predator, because sometimes the two of them would spend the night outside of the coop. But no, later that spring we discovered the polka dot hen walking in the yard with four baby chicks trailing behind her. She had been hiding to sit on eggs. That night, we tried to find where she had hidden them, but we could not. So the next day when she was walking around with only two baby chicks, we feared that something had eaten the other two. We decided to catch the momma and two chicks and move them to a safe place in the red barn. Catching them was not easy, but we did it to try to save the lives of the two baby chicks.

The two chicks were raised in a separate pen in the red barn with their momma and soon they were big. One was a hen and the other was a rooster and they were both white with black polka dots. When they were big enough, we moved them to live in the chicken coop with the others. The momma quickly re-formed her bond with Mr. Sir and the coop, but the chicks had developed bonds only to each other and both were attached to the red barn. No matter how many times we put them back into the coop, each night we would find them roosting in the rafters of the red barn, above where the llamas lived. They lived as if the other chickens did not exist. Eventually, when winter came, we were able to lock them in the coop for an extended period of time during the cold weather and they finally switched their bond to the coop. But they never really connected with the rest of the flock.

So then this past summer everything was turned upside down. Mr. Sir had beaten Louis in a fight and reigned supreme for a while. He fathered three more rooster chicks, which were hatched by Ms. Endsley’s class, and they grew during the summer. One day, about mid summer, we walked out to harvest veggies and there was Mr. Sir, dead on the ground. Our best guess was that Mr. Sir had been defeated in a fight with his son, known to us simply as Mr. Sir’s Son. If it had been a predator, the body would have been eaten or taken, and up until that moment, Mr. Sir was healthy, so it probably was not a disease. The power dynamic had shifted considerably in the course of a few short months, and now Mr. Sir’s Son found himself the only mature rooster in the coop for a while.

Then this winter, the three rooster chicks matured and they started to fight with each other and with Mr. Sir’s Son. We don’t like to have more than two roosters during the winter, because when there are too many, they fight too much and it is stressful for the hens to be chased around so much. We usually butcher the extra roosters at Thanksgiving time when our friends butcher turkeys. But this year they didn’t raise any turkeys, and we did not make alternate plans to butcher, so we had four roosters going into the winter. Although they would fight, it did not seem that bad until late this January when Mr. Sir’s Son was badly injured in a fight and died two days later.

The next day after Mr. Sir’s Son died we noticed a polka dot hen just sitting alone outside. We could go right up to her and pick her up and she did not protest. This is unusual behavior. They usually squawk and run away, especially the polka dots, which are quite fast and wary. When a chicken is this unresponsive, we assume that it is sick and about to die. We put her inside the coop and prepared for another dead chicken. We said good-bye and thanked her for her contribution to the farm and her contribution to the lives of the children who came to see her. However, the next day she was not dead. She was not alone either. One of our older grandma hens was sitting right next to her, keeping her company and keeping her warm. I moved the grandma hen to see how the polka dot was, but the grandma hen came back and nestled up next to the sick hen. Then by the next day our polka dot was back up and running around. This is unusual, because usually once a chicken gets so sick that we notice it, the sickness is pretty far gone and the chicken usually dies.

After the first day we made the connection between our “sick” chicken and the recent unexpected demise of Mr. Sir’s Son. Our theory was that when her lifelong companion chicken was suddenly gone, she was alone for the first time in her life. This could only have been a frightening experience. Chickens are creatures of habit. I wonder if she was sad and grieved the loss of her brother. I have little doubt that if she did not receive the support of the older hen, she would have died. I have seen chickens form what to my human eyes look a lot like friendships, both with each other and with humans. It makes sense that a chicken would mourn the loss of a close friend, in this case, a brother. She is now incorporated back into the flock and I can’t tell her apart from the other polka dots.