Adam Jones Journal

Chickens are pretty dumb. They don't form corporations and they don't invest in IRA's. They take what they can get and divide it up according to one simple rule: the big chicken gets the corn.

At the same time, chickens are a lot smarter than you would think. A chicken can form an attachment to an object like a ping-pong ball and play with it like a toy. If you take her toy and hide it behind something, a chicken will remember where it is and will go there when it gets the chance. It knows that the ball doesn't cease to exist just because it is out of sight.

A human child doesn't know that the ball still exists until he or she is about five years old.

You have probably heard about 'pecking order' in a flock of chickens. The top chicken gets to peck everyone else, and the bottom bird can be pecked by every other bird.

Pecking order is an economic rule.

In good times pecking order determines who gets to eat first. In hard times it determines who gets to eat at all.

On a farm, if the birds are fed inside a coop or building, they enter in order of rank. Once the pecking order has been established, there isn't that much actual pecking. If a bird dies or a new bird is introduced to the flock, there will often be widespread fighting until a new order has been determined. Then things get quiet again - until next time.

The rule itself is pretty general. The weaker bird gives way to the stronger bird whether the item at issue is a piece of corn or a patch of shade. There is something that both birds want, and only one of them can have it. The lower-ranked bird gets out of the way without a fight,

A lot of problems occur in factory farms. When there isn't enough room to get out of the way, the fighting starts.

People who raise chickens are very aware of pecking order. If they aren't careful they may do something, or fail to do something, and the result is a lot of dead or injured chickens.

In the wild, there is no such thing as one chicken. A bird needs to be a member of a larger group in order to be safe from predators. Yielding to the pecking order is the price a chicken has to pay in order to stay alive.

Anthropologists have guessed that pecking order is an evolutionary mechanism that saves wear and tear on the flock. If there were a battle over every insult or every piece of grain, you'd have a pretty beat up flock.

The strict pecking order principle only applies to members of the same flock. When there is no pecking order, each bird has to decide whether to fight or back off. If a seagull and a pelican are both after the same scrap of food, it's usually size that determines whether they fight. A smart seagull doesn't tackle a bird that is twice his size.

This overlaps with a kind of territoriality. I've seen pigeon (with food in front of him) fly ten feet to run off other pigeons who were pecking at a different set of scraps. As far as he is concerned, everything within his line of sight belonged to him. He may have reacted this way because the birds he chased were not members of his own flock. With pigeons it's hard to tell.

There is a kind of patterned randomness at work. In the wild, grain is usually found over a wide area. There is no way for the big chicken to eat every kernel in one bite. If she moves to run off another bird, someone else jumps in and grabs a snack while she is busy attacking the original intruder.

If the grain is located in a smaller area, the high ranked members will move in and eat their fill. Lower ranked birds will hang around on the fringes, poaching or waiting until a higher ranked bird decides he has had enough.

The entry of a new bird, an injury, or the death of a bird often triggers a series of fights until the new hierarchy has been determined. In a lot of domesticated flocks the order does not change over long periods of time.

Chickens recognize the other members of their flock visually. A chicken can remember the face and rank of up to a hundred other birds. If you mix birds with two different colorations, it appears that a chicken can recognize a bird of the other coloration, but is not able to identify an individual bird. They all look alike to her.

As you move up the evolutionary ladder, the pecking order principle persists, but it becomes more complicated. The way in which rank is determined varies from species to species. A few species do not seem to have a pecking order. A few others only exibit a pecking order only under certain circumstances.

There are two basic ways in which animals compete for status: agonic and hedonic. Some species use one method exclusively. Chickens and baboons are agonic. Rank is determined by fighting.<

Hedonic includes chimpanzees who compete by showing off and entertaining, and some birds like the peacock who compete by fancy feathers and strutting.

One species of bird, the Jackdaw, confers status on members of the flock who issue a valid warning cry when they see a predator.

Some species, including the human race are more flexible. The style varies from place to place and from culture to culture. When times get hard and survival requires a struggle, the flexible species usually move to the agonic mode.

Apes don't form corporations, but they do form committees and cliques, and dividing up the goodies becomes a group effort. Apes even form social classes where rank in the group is partially hereditary. When an individual decides to buck the system, he is no longer challenging a single individual, he has to challenge a group.

When you get to the human race, the process becomes a lot more elaborate and the dance becomes still more sophisticated. People belong to more than one group and may have different rank within each group. Membership in one group may affect your rank and treatment by another group.

In human  society, a lot of status behavior is based on symbols. Groups are defined by clothing, cars, office furnature, education and anything else that allows the group to make a distinction. The first distinction seems to be "is this person one of us". Once that's been settled, finer distinctions are made that determine the persons rank within the group.

If the person is outside the group, a separate distinction is made to determine the relative rank of the group they do belong to.

Most of these calculations happen at an unconscious or pre-conscious level. We ask the questions that are important to us, and allow us to place the other person in some category.

We don't always identify our categories in words. How we treat that person in the future is usually determined by a complex set of feelings that we are not consciously aware of.