LEICESTER, England (Reuters) - Pigs and chickens are more intelligent than most people believe, scientists said Wednesday.
Chickens can learn from each other and are encouraged by example, and pigs use subtle social behavior and signal their competitive strength to rivals, researchers from the University of Bristol in southern England told a science conference.
Despite their reputation as the bird-brains of the avian world, chickens can be taught what food to eat or avoid, are able to adapt their behavior and can learn to navigate, studies have shown.
“There are hidden depths to chickens,” said Professor Christine Nichol who has studied their behavior.
Pigs have also demonstrated cunning behavior and shown they can exploit the knowledge of their colleagues to obtain food.
They may also be able to discriminate between different levels of aggressiveness to sort out their social order.
“Our results suggest that pigs can develop quite sophisticated social competitive behavior, similar to that seen in some primate species,” Dr. Mike Mendl told the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival.
Actually I think that ALL animals are SMART and can communicate with each other. And the fact that humans don’t understand them only means that they are stupid, brainless and arogant mamals.
Some people think that farm animals are stupid especially chickens,
and that’s why these animals are not important… and we can use
them as we want…
But I have an interesting question:
What would happen to a human child if he is born in a cage far from his parents.
If he is given food all the time but he doesn’t see anything but his
cage. Doesn’t go to school. Doesn’t play with other children.
Nobody is teaching him anything and he doesn’t have the freedom to
learn on his own mistakes.
Does he have any stimulus to become smart and intelligent?
So may be it’s a good idea for carnivores to create human farms that
will grow fat brainless humans. Or this is not the same? We are more
important then animals? Because of what? Because we are powerful!? Are we? What
is our power? Can we stop a volcano, or a tsunami? Can we stop a
tornado or an earth quake? Can we bring back to life all the amazing
species that were destroyed by us in several years, species that lived
thousands of years before us? Can we stop the ecological disasters that
happen around the world? Can we? May be someday in the future we will
have these awesome powers… if we don’t destroy ourselves in wars…
Humans have an amazing ability to depreciate things when it’s in their interest to do so. Calling chickens, pigs and cows “stupid” is humanity’s way to justify raising them in deplorable conditions (which not all animals are raised in… but it does happen to a degree I’m not certain of), then killing them and consuming their flesh.
It doesn’t matter how much research there is to suggest that the animals we eat are every bit (even more) as capable of emotion and thought as our cats, dogs, or even ourselves, they want their meat. They’ll eat their meat regardless, because they’re raised to and because everybody else does. They like it. They want it. There’s nothing stopping them, and they’ll have it.
