Humans Can Identify Emotional State Of Chickens, Study Suggests

A new study suggests that most humans can interpret chicken emotion by listening to its clucks, implying that humans have a deep, "intuitive ability" to grasp emotions across species.

Chicken Sound

In a study published in the Royal Society of Open Science, a group of Australian researchers found that 7 out of 10 humans can detect if chickens are happy or sad based on the sounds they make.

Prior to this, scientists knew that humans could interpret animal sounds. Little was known, however, regarding people's ability to decipher whether these noises are made in a "rewarding or non-rewarding context."

To study, 194 people were invited to listen to eight calls while chickens expected a reward and eight calls when they didn't. They were then asked if they felt the chicken was excited or annoyed.

Participants in the study heard a succession of clucks delivered by enthusiastic chickens anticipating food. They also heard the chirps of chicks who were later refused food.

The study stressed that the ability of humans to recognize reward-related calls could improve the management of farmed hens and increase their welfare.

This also gives hope to those who are now caring for farmed hens that they may detect their emotional condition even if they have no prior expertise.

"Being able to decipher the emotional state in an alarm call helps receivers to determine the severity of the threat and is particularly advantageous in dangerous situations," the study said.

Future research could consider reward and non-reward-related vocalizations to be reliable 'markers' of internal states, enabling the establishment of automated assessments of degraded or good welfare states within poultry management systems.

The study notes that it is unclear whether familiarity with the animal influences the capacity of humans to distinguish these calls.

Previous research has indicated that a participant's experience with the species in issue improves their ability to correctly differentiate a sound.

Darwin's Theory

These findings also add to recent research suggesting that humans all across the world recognize emotions in the sounds of a wide variety of animals, from tree frogs and alligators to ravens and giant pandas.

According to the findings, terrestrial animals share an emotional vocal signaling system, which is consistent with Darwin's theory.

Charles Darwin, a Victorian naturalist, believed that animals further down the evolutionary tree conveyed their feelings verbally.

He outlined how the ability might have evolved through progressive modifications in the animals' vocal organs in The Descent of Man in 1871. It opened the possibility that many organisms not only shared a talent for emotion-laden calls but might also respond to emotions in the calls of other species.

If the idea survives more research, experts believe it might be put into animal welfare assessments, which would be especially useful on farms with thousands of birds. Smallholders, on the other hand, may profit from knowing that their perception of chicken calls is likely to be right.