I feel ill when I see the cruel and disrespectful way luckless chickens are treated in the wake of this dreadful avian flu epidemic. Do people know of the true intelligence of the common old chicken?

Tune into any TV station and you’ll see entities with moon-suits blinding chickens with disinfectant sprays then grabbing them by their wings, necks or a leg and forcing them flapping and screaming for mercy into sacks where they die from fear, injury or suffocation.

Or you’ll see street vendors pulping live chickens’ heads against the pavement or crushing them underfoot as if in punishment to quell the dreaded disease … feathers flying, birds dead in rows and heaps … some still twitching before the hand of death strikes its cruel blow.

Etched in my memory is a video I saw at Onderstepoort Veterinary College. It involved several laying hens which had been removed from a life sentence in a battery in order to study their behaviour and intelligence. These chickens had spent their entire existence in dark, dingy squalor, squashed into tiny, wire cages, not large enough for them to turn in. Their beaks were broken, they had few feathers on their emaciated bodies and their feet were so crippled from disuse they were barely able to stand.

Then these pathetic creatures saw sky and grass for the first time and were given natural living conditions and abundance of food. The amazing thing was, in spite of the terrible psychological trauma they must have suffered before, they quickly recovered and within a short time were able to walk and scratch the earth and do all the things free ranging chickens enjoy.

What the chickens learned

And then, even more mind blowing was the complexity of task-tests these little beings learned in next to no time. The experiment required them to push open a hinged door, climb a ladder, and pull a cord 3 times to release a trap door through which they had to pass.  Once on the other side, they climbed a ladder, selected and pecked an appropriate button which released a draw bridge. This took them into a maze, after which they walked along a rope and down a shoot, which ended their perilous and complex journey and where their  prize   awaited them  …. a handful of straw on which to lay their precious eggs!  Truly a remarkable feat!

Surely these true little Einsteins who are being murdered in their billions deserve to be treated with more dignity, especially as their downfall is a result of man’s filth and greed. And yet no one seems to care.