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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong.

They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.

Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.

Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.

I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.

That was a nice personal discovery.

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It’s not the egg industry that will lose out if more people have backyard hens. It’s the poultry industry and the eating general. More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

Given people grew animals for eating for centuries and generally were more cruel to them then we are , I doubt.

Those people were a lot more desperate for food than we were too, though.

> and generally were more cruel to them then we are

Strongly disagree with this part of your statement. The scale of suffering from industrial animal processing far exceeds anything from past centuries. The one-on-one cruelty of past centuries exists today as well (there are plenty of hidden camera videos to that effect), but what's really different is that now we treat animals as if they are mere inputs to industrial processes, as if they have no feelings or emotions or capacity for suffering.

In past centuries, chickens roamed free, sheep and cattle grazed on fields, etc. It was an idyllic experience compared to today's factory farm hellscape.

That's so keenly true I wonder how we've ended up with a society where it's not only non-obvious, but even dubious, to such a significant percentage of people.

There's not really any human analogue to industrial meat factories, except maybe like Nazi concentration camps, or ... I mean really only that, right? Maybe something Genghis Khan did might occupy that same space.

Like Eazy-E famously said, it's not how you die, it's how the moments from your birth, all the way through to the end of your life in this world, add up. Do you get a positive number?

Chicken/horse born on a ranch? Yeah.

Chicken/horse/cow born in a concrete meat factory? I mean, I don't think so...

We are orders of magnitude more cruel to factory farmed animals than farming at any other point in history.

I don’t know, farmers always had dogs on the farm but they didn’t eat them and continued to eat the chickens. Chicken is really great and succulent. Hard to resist frying one of them up and sucking the meat off the bone. Absolutely no desire to do that with a dog.

I say the smartest hunters are the farmers.

I read about these Hawaiians that would use stones to wall in an area of water but leave gaps big enough to let smaller fish in. They’d create an environment that was safe (appeared so to the fish) and provide food. This would keep most of them reliably inside the wall. Eventually the fish mature and can’t escape due to their size. And now you have ocean fish that are easy to harvest.

Dogs are hard to keep for meat at any scale. We only eat easy animals. Sympathy has very little to do with it.

Almost no culture routinely eats meat-eating animals. It is very easy to determine, even in ancient times, that it is incredibly easy to get sick from eating meat-eating animals. This is because predators often catch and eat diseased prey, and end up having a lot of parasites and such.

Not to mention the meat of such animals tastes much worse.

Yeah plus the whole they eat things I can't and turn it into something I can eat.

People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.

Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.

It makes sense to me. If you grow up seeing animals slaughtered on the regular you probably won't think much of it, especially when the adults around you treat it as completely normal. You grow up in an environment where you might think meat comes from the magic meat factory, when you see an animal slaughtered for the first time it's likely to be shocking enough to turn a lot of people away.

Very true. Just like when slaves were commonplace, it was 'normalised' and many people just turned a blind eye.

The people who think meat comes from a magic meat factory are blind.

Everything biological is going to be eaten. Your dog or cat would eat you if you were dead and they were hungry enough. I am not saying we shouldn't evolve past eating meat, it would be great for the environment. But to say that one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical is an indictment of nature.

I think the problem with this argument is the assumption that nature is inherently good. Nature is cruel and uncaring. Moving beyond it is a good thing imo. We’re just lucky that as a species by the roll of the dice we were given the power by nature to usurp it.

Literally picking a fight with Nature, what a trope.

What will they think of next man versus self? What if the thing that man creates in his hubris isn’t actually better?

What if it is? We transcend nature and evolution because of our culture and foresight.

We are the ultimate result of 4 billion years of evolution. Nature has made itself redundant in some ways.

Actually, transcend is the wrong word we are still a part of nature of course but we can literally leave the planet and have the ability to irradiate this globe to erase most macroscopic life.

We are an outside context problem as an Iain Banks Ship Mind would say.

It’s a huge responsibility and opportunity that we will almost certainly squander.

We are nowhere near being able to live outside this planet without significant struggle. It would be far easier to live in a submarine in the ocean than anywhere else in this solar system.

Our culture and foresight has brought us into such misalignment that 25% of the US population is on psychiatric drugs, you have a lot of homeless, a drug epidemic, there's a general crisis of meaning, males have given up on finding partners, women are all competing for a few men or think they're all animals and stay away from them. To be able to eat quality food costs a lot and few people have the time or energy to cook anyway because city life is so stressful to most.

We are living in a profoundly sick society and economy all over the world. WW3 is knocking on the door, one wrong move and we fuck up the only ecosystem we have in the galaxy.

I'd bet if people were given the choice between living in a small fishing village from 2000 years ago and modern lower middle class the choice would be obvious.

So to say we have mastered nature and we know better requires a lot of hubris.

You really need to define "good" in this sentence. How can nature move beyond nature?

>> Nature is cruel and uncaring

These are not the same thing. You're interpreting "uncaring" as inherently cruel, but it's not; just uncaring.

That's not what "and" means

Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it. Nature has no free will or emotions or intelligence. It is indeed uncaring, because it doesn't have the capacity to care. Nature is neither good nor bad. It just is.

Whether or not it is moral or ethical to eat animals is an arbitrary decision made by emotional beings. There is no right or wrong there, only what people feel.

Someone who is vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons is making a choice, not living some sort of universal truth. Someone who eats meat is also making a choice.

Someone who eats meat but criticizes others for eating the "wrong" kind of meat is a hypocrite.

Certainly the way we farm animals for food can be sustainable or unsustainable. I wish people would focus more on that aspect than pointing fingers and making it a moral issue.

> Nature is not cruel, don't anthropomorphize it.

You're defining the word cruel to narrowly. Per Merriam-Webster "causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain" and Cambridge "(of an event) causing suffering". Natural forces can be cruel. So can fate and life.

I agree with you but think you miss that the common concern is with the farming process. The fact to eat another animal usually comes as

- a shortcut : “I don’t eat animals” instead of “I avoid encouraging the farming process by consuming the product of those farms: […]”

- and/or a following philosophic stance, that seems logical (debatable) when someone avoid encouraging the farming process.

Few are the vegans that claims that an animal eating another animal is not natural, or that they cats wouldn’t eat them in the condition you describe (which to be honest, rarely happens).

There are plenty of great moral arguments for why animals (or humans) shouldn't be eaten unless they died of purely natural causes. Factory farming is just the strongest to argue against and the main source of both suffering and death, so it's what people focus on. If factory farming were abolished overnight, vegans and vegetarians would (rightly) immediately move onto hunting and small farms.

(I personally think there's nothing wrong with home/farm egg laying as long as the animals are taken care of well and the male ones aren't killed. That's why I'm vegetarian rather than vegan.)

This seems like a category error. We don't typically assign moral agency to animals the same way we do to humans. No one is saying "one biological creature eating another biological animal is unethical." Some people are saying it is unethical for humans, who we typically do believe have moral agency, to eat other animals. Just as no one would say it is unethical for a snake to kill someone with its venom, but we would say it is unethical for a human inject someone with snake venom in order to kill them.

What's wrong with indicting nature? Male animals regularly rape female animals. We shouldn't hold animals morally culpable, as they aren't moral agents, but humans are moral agents. There is no human act in this world for which "this is commonplace in nature" is a moral defense.

Nature can be harsh and cruel indeed.

I think we agree the term “natural” should almost always be questioned and unpacked. It often serves as a rhetorical device instead of a nugget of wisdom.

Dismissing an idea solely for being “unnatural” is premature. Or vice versa.

At the same time, there is wisdom in being curious about weirdness that seems nonsensical. Some weird things have a backstory and even rationale that is non-obvious. Or maybe their benefit is subtle or hidden to those who only look narrowly. (Chesterton’s Fence)

Slight topic shift, but conceptually related: I hope the slash and burn “reformers” we’re seeing have the humility to recognize that institutional knowledge is diffused in ways they do not understand as outsiders. It doesn’t grow back quickly. Just because Chaos Monkey works at Netflix doesn’t mean it works for Congressionally-authorized government agencies. Rapid destruction can be far worse than measured reprioritization.

I get it though — as a programmer I sometimes prefer to throw out a previous code base and start a-fresh, and this can help with clearing out technical debt. Such a rewrite is risky though, as is well known. Besides, technical abstractions are often orthogonal to domain knowledge and expertise.

I grew up buying meat and never seeing farms. About 7 years ago, I helped my sister/BIL raise a flock from hatchling to food. We did everything.

Having actually slaughtered and butchered chickens I raised, I'd rather raise my own. I know the chickens I raised had a better life and death than factory farmed chickens.

Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life. The constant meat eater trolling about how its natural to eat meat and animals do it, ignore the fact that its not natural to keep animals in pens where they cant turn around for their entire life that is basically pure torture from birth to death.

If all meat was produced the way it was farmed 100 years ago, youd see way less vegans.

I mean, it can be both.

Factory farming has been around for more than 100 years. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906.

The meat industry has done a pretty good job keeping the horrors of slaughter houses out of the public eye, especially in the days before almost everyone was walking around with a video recorder in their pocket.

I'm sure exposure to what's really involved in modern meat production has increased the popularity of veganism, but veganism has been around for at least a thousand years.

Were that the case, you’d see vegans advocating for eating classically-husbanded animals. But I for one have never seen such a thing. And when I’ve spoken with vegans about this very topic, they’ve insisted that no animal can possibly be raised/slaughtered humanely – the belief seems almost axiomatic to them.

I’m generally a vegetarian, but I eat chicken, beef, and pork from local farms that raise the animals ethically.

This conflates animal rights with animal welfare. The vegans who are motivated by the latter might do as you suggest. But a strict interpretation of animal rights means respecting the right to live. This underpins religious vegetarianism too.

Still other vegans are motivated by concerns about the environment. For them too, "classical husbandry" will not be a winning argument. If anything the opposite, since it requires more land.

> its not natural

Neither is using fire to cook food.

Your point? (Or are you recommending a raw food diet?)

As I read their message, the point is that non-meat eaters have more problems with the unethical ways to farms than the killing itself or the process to eat another animal. Those two last points may be used in punchlines but if you discuss with the speaker you’ll ear way more about the raising condition that the instant they animal is killed.

You're a reasonable / pragmatic vegan. Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans.

There's even a small amount of vegans that consider lab meat to be something immoral (how they loop their head around that one, I do not know).

I'm currently dating a girl that's vegan and is super chill about it, but when I was 16 I dated a vegan girl also. My mother made two separate dishes for her, one specifically with esoteric stuff she would like (Christmas being special and all that). Then my mother made the mistake of quickly flipping some burning food with some meat in it, then using the same spatula to muddle the vegan dish. That girlfriend immediately said she would not eat that dish.

I nearly decided to break up with her at that moment.

I'm never quite sure it it's anecdata, but it always feels like there are much more obnoxiously stringent vegans than there are obnoxious meat eaters.

On the other hand, I've seen firsthand how vegans have to consistently defend their lifestyle choice, because by making that choice they reveal the "default" was never really that. Same with those who chose to be sober.

These dogmatic vegans aren't born that way - they're created by a completely unethical farming environment and detachment from farm life as /u/partition mentioned.

As I grow up I am beginning to realize just how many "bad personalities" and "horrible life choices" are really just driven by a poor environment - and that speaks more of our society and governance than the individuals.

part of Western society ethos is our quick action within any sort of realm to "pick X; be a dick about it"

I absolutely love this characterization of modern discourse.

I think I and most vegans also wouldn't eat it. It has nothing to do with rudeness or even the specific ethics of that situation or something. Just I wouldn't be able to physically stomach it. I would feel guilty but I wouldn't be able to eat it.

Best course of action imo is watch yourself in that moment, understand that people are going above and beyond for you even though they don't fully understand you, they are trying to accept you. I'd go to the bathroom, try to reason with myself that no animals are being killed specifically for you, the accidental touch won't give any flavour to your dish and it's all in your head. There's no ethical issues whatsoever in that situation.

If after that you still can't make yourself eat it then you should apologize, explain it to them, tell them you tried to make yourself but couldn't and I bet you'd get a LOT more sympathy.

> Vegans that won't eat meat because of the kill are ideological / dogmatic vegans

I've never met any other kind of vegan person. If they were concerned only about the living conditions of the animals, then they would eat free-range ethically-raised meat. They don't. Even if it's really free-range and not what the government allows to be called "free-range."

Eh, not sure I buy that interpretation. Ensuring that the meat you eat only comes from ethical sources is hard, especially if you eat at restaurants, or if you eat food that other people have cooked. (Do you really want to be that person who goes to someone's house for dinner and on-the-spot refuses to eat because their host isn't sure of the provenance of the meat?) It can also be significantly more expensive. It would be entirely reasonable to decide to give up meat rather than deal with all that, if it matters to you.

And on top of that it does make a statement about one's values. Even if someone was ok with doing all that homework, they might want to give up meat as a form of protest against all the factory animal farming out there.

Peter Singer makes this argument in Animal Liberation, one of the seminal works on modern animal ethics. One of Singer's points is that it's ethical to eat animals so long as they are raised and killed in a way to minimize suffering.

IMO everyone should read it, regardless of your stance on eating animals.

> Why do people always think its the killing? Almost every vegan/vegetarian has most of their issues with how its raised and treated its whole life.

But definitionally a vegetarian is someone who abstain from eating meat period, regardless of the source. Someone can avoid eating unethically sourced meat but still eat ethically sourced meat and thus definitionally not be a vegetarian. So it's fair to assume that ethical vegetarians (those who practice it for ethical reasons) believe that all meat consumption is unethical. Otherwise they wouldn't be vegetarians.

I acknowledge there is probably a caveat of people who practice vegetarianism because they don't believe they can find ethically sourced meat and thus forgo meat consumption entirely. I find that strange though as cage free meat is pretty widely sold, at least in the USA per my experience.

Put another way: If 99% of the animals you see on a day to day basis are pets and not livestock, it's hard to not think of all animals as potential pets instead of resources.

Surely this is more a case that it used to be much harder to be vegetarian and almost impossible to be vegan! Now we actually have a clear choice given the development and availability of so many other foods and supplements. Hence for me to value my enjoyment of foods above the life of another animal seems pretty harsh at best.

Even chicken eggs really are not cruelty free - if you truly love animals, you would stop eating all animal products imo. Otherwise you are simply lying to yourself.

Converse opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YFz99OT18k

Thousands of nations, billions of people. If only they knew the gnostic truth you hold in your breath...

> it used to be much harder to be vegetarian

Millions of Indian people have been vegetarian for hundreds (if not thousands) of years now. I guess there are manufactured meat replacements now, but I prefer to just eat things like legumes over factory made vegan food.

I assume GP meant "... in the West". I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, and I can't imagine being a vegan, or even a vegetarian then. Certainly it would be doable if you always cooked your own food, but restaurants would mostly not accommodate you (unless you'd be fine with just a boring, flavorless salad), and if you went over to anyone's house for a meal, they'd think it was weird that you didn't eat meat.

To be fair, food was very difficult to come upon historically. Killing an animal and not eating it was equivalent to burning money for fun.

Vegetarianism (voluntary) didn't become more than an edge case until food was heavily commoditized and readily available.

This rings more true for me. Food simply used to be a lot more expensive.

"Between 1960 and 2000, the average share of Americans’ disposable personal income (DPI) spent on food fell from 17.0 percent to 9.9 percent." [1]

I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

> I am not going to look for a source right now but I would venture that since the 1960's were part of the industrial era that food was even more expensive before the creation of the Haber process and gas powered farm tools.

You are correct that it used to be even higher. The US BLS estimates around 40% of DPI was spent on food at the turn of the century (1901). [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....

> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms

A classic case of mixing up correlation with causation?

> Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms

As did dental care and cars. Correlation is not causation.

People also have been publicly maiming and killing other people for vengeance and entertainment for millennia. Morality really does evolve. That includes animals as well.

This is about when people starting realizing such farms are contributing to planetary environmental harm.

Also, as gruesome as a backyard slaughter might seem, it's nothing compared to the industrial equivalent.

But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.

Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?

Chicken -> poultry

Cow -> beef

Pig -> pork

That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.

I always wondered about that. I thought it was just for euphemistic purposes to create more separation between the food we eat and the animal that it came from.

When you’re hungry, you tend to care less about deep ethical questions and more about being fed. There’s the old trope about wealth and food:

Poor people ask if you got enough to eat. Middle class people ask if it tasted good. Wealthy people ask if it looked good.

Which correspond to points on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I think we can use that framework to understand where vegetarianism and veganism fit in. You might say that they are either related to personal feelings of being ethical or status symbols, or both.

It didn't stop me and my family. (Chicken katsu is still one of my favorites dishes.) To be sure, we did not eat our own chickens (just their eggs). Somehow we were able to still mentally distance ourselves from ours and "the others".

I was living in San Jose in a dense suburban neighborhood. It became legal to have backyard chickens so I jumped at getting three chickens. (We had three young daughters, see.)

One mysteriously died. Of the remaining two, the bossy one decided she was a rooster and started crowing, of a sort, in the morning hours.

So we had one asshole neighbor complain and I was obliged to send them off to live with a friend who had some property in the Santa Cruz mountains. Sad. And afterward, neighbors strolling by said they missed the chicken sounds in the neighborhood.

I'll spare you the unfortunate ends for the two. I'll say the Santa Cruz mountains represent more predators and require someone with a little more responsibility than my friend showed. (I don't blame him. It was really my fault — having more or less dumped them on him.)

Everything loves a chicken dinner. Unless you live in a city where the predator population has already been driven out, you are faced with the decision to either let them free roam (and accept a small but steady rate of predation) or keep them penned when not under direct supervision. There's not a third option.

Some sort of goat maybe?

Goats can be territorial, but I'm not aware of them having any particular inclination to guard chickens or livestock.

Livestock guard dogs work better, but then you're dealing with a large dog that isn't a pet and isn't socialized like a house dog.

Can't your livestock guard dog also be a pet that's socialized like a house dog? Are the two mutually exclusive?

Based solely on what I've read and experience with them when I'm on a bicycle...

Not really, because you want to dog to be bonded to the livestock, not the humans. The dog lives outside amongst the other farm animals. They tend to be more territorial and protective than pet dogs. All that said, I've seen them used more with sheep than poultry.

If your dog is hanging out with you, it's not guarding the henhouse.

We had racoons, skunks, and foxes paying nightly visits. Occasionally one would find a way into the coop and there would be a massive kill off. We got a dog, and just the scent of the dog around the coop has been enough to eliminate the skunks and racoons anyway. The fox still does come by from time to time. We had to put a net over the roof of the coop because of hawks.

Our coop is impenetrable; we never lost any chickens that way. But they would get picked off during the day by hawks, coyotes, and bobcats. One every month or two.

We've given up and are switching to bantams in an enclosed run.

> More people will start to find...

...that roosters are total assholes.

There's room for exactly one in the flock, and I have no emotional difficulty turning the rest into stew. The "chickens are cute" narrative only works in a carefully curated frame.

I have grown up with chickens through out my childhood and I strongly disagree with that take. If anything, it makes it more reasonable to eat chicken given that backyard hens are more sustainable and more natural than processed food bought in the store. Chickens reproduce at a very fast pace, and it is not like one is going to eat the oldest and nicest ones.

It does however makes factory farmed animals much less fun to eat, both in term of taste and the knowledge of how much better backyard hens has it. It is like buying clothes manufactured from countries with less-than-stellar working environment.

I don't eat sunflower-seeds, as sunflowers murder one another by throwing shade.

I told the kids not to name the roosters, but we eat them regardless. Once again, humans excel at holding contradictory thoughts.

Considering the bizarro world we're now living it, I wouldn't put it beyond us for it to go the other way.

If people realise they are still comfortable eating intelligent emotional animals like chickens, the dogs and cats of this world should watch their backs!

The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating.

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

The only reason we don't eat dogs or cats is because they don't taste good. Predators don't make for good eating. They have to work too hard physically for their food. It makes their meat tough.

That said there are places where dog is eaten usually as a stew because that makes it more tender.

Speak for yourself. I would never eat a cat or dog because to me they are pets, and I would feel terrible doing it.

Whatever they taste like is very very secondary to that.

I’m speaking as a human looking at the historical context of eating animals. Predators taste terrible because they are high effort, low reward in terms of nutritional value.

I am absolutely not advocating that we start eating pets. I would feel terrible about it too. And if I have an option, besides starving to death, I would take it.

The other reason why predators have become pets is because they had a strong additive value in terms of hunting or protection. Dogs in term protection, and hunting and cats in terms of pest control. Groups with these kind of pets tended to fair better.

Wait until we find out how intelligent broccoli is.

Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)

Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.

Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.

I know a guy who does similar. He gives the messed up parts that got damaged to his dog.

I’m from a rural area. I have formative memories of raising caring for and slaughtering animals. Hunting and fishing, literally put food on the table. I don’t remember anyone complaining that the chicken in the gumbo came from the yard.

My aunt names all her chickens. She will also grab one and twist its head of with her bare hands while carrying on a casual conversation with you.

Have chickens and they are dumber than fish. Have no qualms about eating them.

> More people will start to find eating intelligent emotional animals as abhorrent as eating dogs or cats.

Why do you think that people abjuring consumption of emotionally observable animals is more likely that the opposite: growing an acceptance of eating other sentient beings as part of the cycle of life?

As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.

I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)

My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.

My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.

Depends how they’re raised… impressionable creatures. Though IME some roosters especially are just plumb mean.

A mean rooster has a surprisingly high terror-to-size ratio, and can easily draw blood with its spurs. And they carry grudges, and they’ll stalk you.

Can confirm. We used to own a mean rooster and he would certainly stalk me when he was out of the run. Not sad that a fox ate him. Would have preferred the hens not also been eaten though. Our current rooster is pretty chill and just ignores me. He even consents (begrudgingly) to my young daughter picking him up and holding him.

We used to have one around the barnyard who hated me and hated my son (maybe 5 years old at the time) and hated it even more when I was carrying my son on my shoulders.

I learned from that, and other experience of hand-to-hand combat with birds, wildcrafting eggs [1], and such, to "never let a bird see your back". I like it how those little red-wing blackbirds like to sit on POSTED: NO TRESSPASSING signs because that is their attitude. They'll dive bomb you but also flap really hard up high at the sky to nip at the wings of hawks who are lazily cruising. You might not even notice they have a nest to protect if they weren't getting in your face about it.

[1] at least seven years ago, I think...

The kinds of intelligence they display is really interesting.

They can't figure out obstacles very well if they can see where they want to go, but are impeded. They just pace back and forth, frustrated, instead of walking around the obstacle.

They are very social, recognize people, and can be trained in some limited ways (eg. to return to the coop with whistles, if you associate it with treats).

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