raptorsandpoultry:

My job for the last three summers in a (very awesome and cool) nutshell.

So many people (certain university professors included) are unaware of the fact that chickens can be “clicker-trained”, or trained using operant conditioning, let alone be taught all of these fairly complex tasks. Not only is it a great and easy enrichment activity you can do with your pet chickens if you have any, but it’s used by research laboratories all over the world to try and make important discoveries in areas like animal behaviour and neuroscience.

I’ve done/currently do both - I train my pet chickens to provide them with some physical and mental exercise, and I train laboratory chickens and turkeys for studies that try to solve pressing concerns about the welfare of farmed poultry. In my first summer, I compared the learning abilities of egg-laying hens fed diets with different nutrient levels to see if commercial diets impair brain function in these chickens. The next summer, I trained laying hens to peck a green light for a reward, while also teaching them to ignore a red light - exactly as shown in this video - to determine whether an “impulsive” personality was one of the factors contributing to aggressive feather-pecking behaviour on farms (no post about that one yet, as the results still need to be published)! And that’s just me. There are other animal behaviour & welfare labs at my university, and at universities across many countries, that use operant conditioning as a technique to objectively ask animals about their feelings, preferences, etc. The same goes for other farm animals, zoo animals, and basically any other animal used by humans - there is always scientific research going on to figure out what is best for them.