MOTHER hens are not just highly protective of their chicks but also pass on handy tips on coping with life to their fluffy offspring, a veterinary study has shown.

The cultural aspects of life as a chicken were yesterday discussed at a conference on animal sentience organised by Compassion in World Farming.

Professor John Webster, an emeritus professor at Bristol University, praised the intelligence of poultry, citing an experiment at Bristol University in which hens were fed a mixture of yellow and blue grain.

The yellow was harmless, but the blue contained lithium chloride which made them feel ill. The hens quickly learnt to avoid the blue grain. The same hens then laid eggs and when the chicks were three weeks old the mother hens encouraged them to roam around the farm — as is their wont.

Blue and yellow grains were then scattered around the farm, though this time both the blue and yellow grains were harmless. But the mother hens immediately sensed danger for their young and began to push the chicks away from the blue grain and lead them to the yellow instead.

Professor Webster said: “What this tells us is that the mother hen has learnt what food is good and what is bad for her, that she cares so much for her chicks she will not let them eat the bad food and she is passing on to her young what she has learnt. To me that is pretty close to culture — and an advanced one at that. Chickens are sentient creatures and have feelings of their own.”

Professor Webster denied that he was suggesting people should boycott eating chickens, but said that perhaps we should think about the manner of their welfare. “I don’t eat broiler chickens [factory-farmed], for example.People should think about the standards in which animals are kept.”

Today the conference will learn that horses are such sociable animals that they will risk anything rather than spend time on their own. Horse owners in Britain will be urged to think hard about whether they can improve their horses’ quality of life.

Bill Swann, the international director of the Brooke Hospital for Animals, has monitored the behaviour of working donkeys and horses in India and Guatemala. In Guatemala he found that horses were well looked- after but scared of human beings. The reason was soon clear, he said.

“They wander in small groups, nuzzling each other, playing, chasing and foraging together, [sometimes] ending up on private land, including fields in forest clearings where families grow corn. To prevent [the animals] causing damage and stealing corn, people drive them away by kicking or throwing stones at them — sometimes even attacking them with machetes — frequently causing injuries.” Dr Swann said that nonetheless the horses kept returning to forage together.

“The conclusion is that social behaviour is so important to horses they will risk even serious injury to engage in it.”

He added: “I don’t want to accuse anyone of doing something wrong, but I would like people to see if they can improve the lot of their horses. In small stables, the animals may not have enough contact with each other.”

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