Study Finds That Ranging Behaviours Impact On Problem-Solving In Chickens

Chickens have different personalities, a new study has suggested. This finding, which will hardly come as a surprise to most keepers, was published in Biology Letters in what the researchers believe to be the first study of its kind.

In the experiment, researchers focused on how different ranging behaviours in free-range chickens impact their ability to solve problems. There are two ranging behaviours — high ranging and low ranging — and those classifications simply describe how far a chicken ventures from the coop.

Classifications in place, the researchers wanted to see whether this difference in ranging behaviour had an effect on a bird’s motor self-regulation performance. A cylinder full of food was set up in the coop which required the birds to curb their natural instinct to feed from the centre of the cylinder and instead eat from the side openings. Overall most of the birds didn’t succeed at the task, but researchers discovered that high rangers had a significantly poorer performance than low rangers which improved with each repetition of the experiment.

This finding suggests that individual behavioural traits do have an impact on the ability to complete cognitive tasks — and that perhaps a bird with a more fearful and vigilant personality is more adaptive to its surroundings.

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