She’s an enthusiastic learner and has quickly soared to the top of her class. She is also one for drama — sometimes screeching or even shoving her peers when someone else gets a turn.

This would be extreme in a typical classroom — but Tiny is not your typical student. She’s a rescued chicken living at Farm Sanctuary.

Tiny’s flock is the first cohort of Farm Sanctuary’s Joys of Learning study. Developed under stringent research ethics guidelines that focus on agency and a positive experience for the participants, it’s a 100% voluntary chicken-focused project giving them the opportunity to learn — and have fun.

They’re also teaching us how we can best support their care.

Animal research is a hot-button topic. Many studies are invasive and exploitative: They are performed on animals for someone else’s benefit. At Farm Sanctuary, while we seek a more comprehensive understanding of the inner lives of farm animals, our research must center the animals’ experience and benefit their lives.

We created our Joys of Learning study with three questions in mind:

1. Do chickens express behavioral and physiological indicators consistent with joy in response to learning?
2. Are chickens more optimistic after being presented with learning opportunities?
3. Are there individual differences in emotional responses to learning?

In other words, we are looking to confirm if cognitive enrichment brings them joy and hope that, whatever the results tell us, sharing our findings can help people see chickens as individuals — and hence, care more about their lives and rights.

In early trials, the Research team placed two bowls — one black, the other white — on a board, filling only one with food. They assigned Tiny the white bowl, added some food, and placed it on the left side of the board, with the empty black bowl on the right. After a few trials with the same configuration, Tiny learned the white, left bowl would always have food — and stopped approaching the empty black, right bowl completely. These arrangements are different for every hen. For Murielle, food will always be in the white bowl located on the right side of the board; Yoshi gets food in the black bowl on the left side, and Dratch gets food in the black bowl placed on the right.

“They have different levels of interest in participating,” shares Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast, Manager of Research & Animal Welfare. “They have different ways of interacting with us humans and different strategies for solving the task that we’ve created. It’s been really cool to see their individual preferences and personalities as expressed as part of the research.”

There are 25 hens in Tiny’s barn; 13 have expressed interest in participating, while eight continue to meet the criteria to be active Joys of Learning participants. “We’ve clearly communicated to them what we’re asking and what they’ll get in return, and they decided this agreement is great,” Prasad-Shreckengast says. “They are loving this partnership.”

Priyanka pushes other chickens out of the way so she’s among the first of the group to have a turn. Murielle darts to her designated bowl as soon as we open the gate for her to pass. Meanwhile, Yoshi does a little preparatory “dance” — taking a few quick steps at the gate before racing down the runway and grabbing her treats.

These repeat, voluntary decisions and behaviors may indicate that chickens like — and seek — experiences that feel good. And they show that pleasure in several ways.

“When you’re measuring emotion in animals, there are three components,” says Director of Research Lauri Torgerson-White.

1. The subjective component is how they feel. We cannot know exactly what’s going on in a chicken’s mind without anthropomorphizing through a human lens.
2. We measure the expressed component by looking at behaviors. “If a chicken is excited or happy — has a positive emotion, say, about the food — they’ll approach it quickly or express their excitement by flapping their wings,” Torgerson-White explains. We can observe this in chickens.
3. The physiological component is how the body responds. “There have been studies done in chickens and in other animals where eye temperatures — and in chickens’ case, comb temperatures — change a tiny, tiny bit when they’re experiencing an emotion,” Torgerson-White says. To measure this, the team set up a thermography camera to track any changes in body temperature as the chickens pass beneath it to get to the food.

Tiny and her friends are Cornish cross chickens, the most exploited chicken breed in the United States. They make up the majority of the 9 billion chickens raised for meat each year in the United States. They’re also very young — these chickens reach an adult weight of 6.5 pounds at just 47 days old. In comparison, it took 10 weeks in 1970 for chickens to reach half of their adult size. Meanwhile, chickens can live up to eight years or more in a sanctuary setting.

Some people think of chickens as unintelligent and accept that as justification for poor treatment. (Ever hear the term “bird brain” used as an insult?) However, it’s unjust to equate worth with intelligence. These birds are not lacking in intellect — they just process and interact with the world differently. When people take the time to see chickens as they are — and not in comparison to others — it becomes more apparent that their lives have value, too.

“We intuitively know that these animals have really complex inner lives,” Torgerson-White says. “And as a society, we have been trained to set that aside so that we can feel okay eating them. The hope with research, no matter what the findings, is to change hearts and minds.”

Farm Sanctuary’s Joys of Learning study was made possible through a generous grant from the ASPCA.