Around this time of the year, your social media doom scrolling might be peppered with images of adorable children holding disgruntled yellow chicks. While the sight of puggy little hands wrapped a little too tightly around the Easter and spring icon might make you cringe, new research suggests that a different sort of human interaction is beneficial for the chicks.
To investigate, a team of researchers used a conditioned place preference test. This assessment is based on the principle that animals should learn to prefer places associated with good/better feelings. They tested 20 domestic laying hen chicks and two chambers. One chamber featured gentle human handling, soft speech, and slow stroking. The other had a neutral human presence, that was silent and still. The chicks were conditioned to these associations.
“To our knowledge, no studies have explored whether chickens can develop conditioned preferences in the context of gentle human handling, such as stroking,” the authors write in a study recently published in the journal Animal Welfare. “Hence, this study aimed to determine whether laying hen chicks display a learned preference for environments where they experience gentle handling treatment compared to those with a neutral presence treatment.”
After the conditioning, the chicks continually spent more time in the chamber previously linked with the tender handling. This shows that the experience has a positive association for the chicks, who also did not keep away from the other more quiet chamber, the researchers highlighted. Importantly, this suggests that the chicks were attracted to the gentle handling and not staying away from the neutral human chamber.
“Our findings show that gentle human contact can trigger positive emotions in young chicks,” Ben Lecorps, an animal welfare scientist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “The study demonstrates how simple, calm handling has the potential to shape the human-animal relationship from fear-inducing to positive and consequently improve the chicks’ welfare.”
These findings could impact animal welfare assessment and husbandry practices in the future. According to the Angell Animal Medical Center-Angell, laying hens are among farming’s most abused animals, with most chickens living in less space than a sheet of paper.
Moral of the story, it could be a good idea to pet chicks, but gently!
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