Free Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow

basket, and enjoyed watching television. I have since heard from several other house-hen owners that chickens love TV.
    Although a chicken needs to spend daily time outdoors doing what chickens do — sunbathing and dust bathing, scratching in dirt, and snacking on such tasty treats as creepy crawlies and tender green things — more and more people find that a single hen of a calm breed makes an entertaining but challenging house pet. The limiting factor is the difficulty of house training a chicken.
    I have brooded lots of newly hatched chicks in my house — at one time I was known as the lady who keeps chickens in her living room — but I never had a chicken as a house pet. I did once have a rooster that was smart enough to come into the basement in the wintertime to warm himself by the woodstove whenever I was dumb enough to leave the basement door open.
Self-Control
    That a chicken can recall the past and anticipate the future has been proven by British researchers. In 2003 Siobhan Abeyesinghe and her colleagues at the Silsoe Research Institute determined that chickens are capable of exercising self-control, which requires resisting immediate gratification in anticipation of a future benefit.
    To determine if chickens are capable of self-control, they offered hens a choice between an immediate but small payoff and a larger payoff available after a delay. The impulsive hen choosing the less-delayed reward obtained less value, while the hen waiting for a more valuable reward was able to maximize her gain by showing self-control.
    Hens were trained to peck colored keys giving them a choice between access to feed almost immediately (impulsive) but only for a short time and waitingseveral seconds (self-control) to gain access to feed for a longer period that allowed them to eat more. A significant number of the hens held out for more feed, proving chickens are capable of understanding that a current choice has future consequences.
Training a Chicken
    Training a chicken is simple but not easy. It requires a consistent, methodical approach and lots of patience. It involves carefully watching the bird for the behavior you desire, letting it know at the precise moment it has done what you want it to do, rewarding it in a timely manner, and repeating the exercise until the bird gets it right every time.
    This type of training is known as operant conditioning and is the way chickens and other animals normally learn how to behave, whether they are being deliberately trained or are learning to survive in their natural environment. The technique was perfected by the late Keller and Marian Breland, who founded the field of applied animal psychology, and Bob Bailey, who married Marian after Keller passed away.
    The Brelands and the Baileys developed a system of training dog trainers by teaching them to train chickens. They chose chickens for this purpose because chickens are readily available, learn fast, and lack complex social interactions. A chicken is behaviorally pretty simple — focusing most of its attention on eating, not being eaten, and making more chickens — so altering its behavior is relatively simple. On the other hand, a chicken moves fast, offering a challenge to the experienced animal trainer and the novice chicken owner alike.
    Until 1990 the Brelands demonstrated the results of their training method at the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where chickens and other trained animals performed tricks with little or no human intervention. In one exhibit a chicken named Casey pecked a small baseball bat to hit a home run, then rounded the bases of a scaled-down baseball field. In another exhibit a chicken enclosed in a fiberglass box played tic-tac-toe against human visitors.
    The method perfected by the Brelands involves obtaining a desired behavior by using positive reinforcement, or a reward. A positive reinforcer may be anything a chicken wants, seeks, or needs — most commonly food. The idea is that if you