A farm shelter in New York explores the inner lives of cows, pigs and chickens – but only if they want to.
While reporting on this story, Emily Antes encountered two cows, seven pigs and countless chickens.
Watkins Glen, New York. It was a frosty October day in the Farmers’ Reserve, and the chickens were restless in the little red barn.
A rooster or two crowed out of sight. A large turkey squeezes through the open door with a solemn air, its tail feathers spread out like a decorative fan. A flock of captive white-feathered chickens emit tiny, intermittent squeaks, an asynchronous symphony of chicken sneezes.
Sasha Prasad-Schrekengast, manager of the animal research and welfare shelter, was preparing to enter the chicken coop and said the chickens were suffering from bouts of a chronic respiratory disease. She put on gloves and shoe covers, donned a pair of blue robes, and slipped inside, ducking face to face with the first chicken that came up.
Miss Prasad-Schrekengast means a literal question. She was trying to find birds to take part in her study: a survey about whether chickens – animals that are usually not distinguished by their brains – like to learn.
But her question is also a big philosophical one that is forcing a new research group from Farm Sanctuary, a non-profit organization that has been trying to end animal husbandry for more than 35 years.
They have a job to do: in the US alone, over 90 million cattle are raised and over 9 billion chickens (and 200 million turkeys) are slaughtered every year. But there are some signs of social shifts. In a 2019 Gallup poll, almost a quarter of Americans said they had reduced their meat consumption. A jury recently acquitted activists who took two piglets from an industrial farm. Fast food giants are adding plant-based meats to their menus, and just last week the FDA gave the green light to lab-raised chicken.
A growing body of research shows that farm-raised species are sentient beings: chickens can see the future, goats seem to be asking people for help, and pigs can feel each other’s emotions.
But Christian Navroth, a behavioral and cognition scientist at the Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany, says scientists know much less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about the minds of monkeys or dogs. “I’m still baffled by how little we know about farm animals given the number or volume of animals we keep,” he said.
Founded in 1986, Farm Sanctuary has always considered farm animals to be sentient beings, even referring to the farm’s feathered and four-legged inhabitants as “humans.”
“They have their own desires, their own desires, preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — just like humans do,” said Laurie Thorgerson-White, director of research at the reserve.
Now the shelter is trying to collect enough data to convince the public of the humanity of the animals.
“We hope,” said Ms. Thorgerson-White, “that, using really rigorous methods, we can uncover pieces of information about the inner life of farm animals that can be used to really change people’s perception of how these animals are used by society. .”
The reserve conducts research in accordance with its strict ethical standards, which include giving animals the right to choose whether to participate in research. As a result, researchers are sometimes faced with what they are passionate about proving: that animals have minds of their own.
Today, the birds at West Chicken seem a little out of sorts. Ms. Prasad-Schrekengast crossed her fingers, saying some of them might still be holding a brief demonstration.
“Hopefully,” she said, “people will feel – for the faint of heart – that they are willing and interested in participating.”
Farm Sanctuary did not begin as a rescue animal shelter, but as a group of young activists dedicated to exposing animal cruelty on farms, stockyards, and slaughterhouses.
“We lived on a school bus on a tofu farm for several years,” said Gene Bauer, president and co-founder of the group. But during the investigation, the group continued to find “live animals waiting to die,” he recalls. “So we went to save them.”
They eventually opened shelters in New York and California, organizing educational programs and advocacy political campaigns. (They raise some of the money by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)
In 2020, the organization, which currently has about 700 animals, began to create its own research group. The goal is to gather more evidence that, as Mr. Baur puts it, “these animals are not just a piece of meat. There are emotions there. There is a personality there. People, not things.”
The research team worked with Lori Grun, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethical principles. Our goal, as explained by Dr. Grün, was to create a framework for animal research “without dominance, controls, and tools.”
Among other things, the guidelines forbid invasive procedures – even blood draws without medical necessity – and state that research should benefit animals. and participation? It’s voluntary.
“Residents should be treated as human beings,” the guidelines state, “and they should always have choice and control over their participation in pilot studies.”
The idea is not entirely new. Animals in zoos, for example, are often taught to cooperate in their own medical care and possibly related research. But the practice is still far from becoming the norm.
For Farm Sanctuary researchers, volunteering is not only a moral imperative, but also a path to better science. The researchers note that much of the previous research has been done on farms or in laboratories, where stress or fear can affect the animals’ behavior and even impair their cognitive abilities.
“We want them to be able to tell us more about their cognitive and emotional abilities and what is the upper limit of the social structure, thanks to the environment they are in and how we conduct research,” said Ms Thorgerson- White. .
While the approach is unconventional, outside scholars find the asylum’s ethics admirable and its research questions interesting.
“The idea that you can study these species, which are usually studied only in some kind of pseudo-farming environment, in a more natural environment that actually not only satisfies their needs, but even their most mysterious preferences – I think that they are correct.” said Georgia Mason, who runs the Campbell Center for Animal Welfare Research at the University of Guelph. “I think it really allows you to do something special.”
The researchers decided to start by studying beaten chickens and their emotional responses to training. “We call it the ‘joy of learning’ but we are not sure if they will experience that joy,” said Ms Thorgerson-White. “That’s our guess.”
To recruit bird volunteers, Ms. Prasad-Schrekengast and her colleague Jenna Holakowsky worked slowly but methodically. Last fall, they spent several days in the chicken coop before opening the door to the hallway, where the experiments were finally carried out.
They then began adding experimental infrastructure—a window grill, a piece of plywood—and handing out feed pellets to any birds brave enough to get close. After about three weeks, they set up the entire experimental field, and 13 birds, who were regularly selected to participate in it, became their team of volunteers.
The researchers gave some chickens the opportunity to learn new things, like how to knock the lid off a bowl, and assessed their overall emotional state with a so-called judgment bias test. Variations on this test have been used across species, including measuring how quickly chickens approach the mysterious bowl and its unknown contents.
The theory is that chicks in a generally good mood are more likely to see a bowl of something good, like food, and move to it faster than chicks in a bad mood.
So far, the researchers have tested eight chickens, half of which belonged to the control group, and it is premature to draw conclusions about the breed. (The initial recruit population dwindled after one bird died, another did not qualify for the study, and three others dropped out – in one case instead of spending time in the nest box. “I think she’s really, really motivated to sit on a few eggs.” said Ms. Prasad-Schrekengast.)
But preliminary evidence suggests that training does lift the spirits of some birds. (This is looking at you, Shirley and Muriel.)
Then there’s Yoshi, who tries to bypass the learning problem entirely. Instead of completing the bonus mission, she immediately went to get some food while trying to skip the window screen in the middle. Although Yoshi eventually condescends to complete the task, she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. She might get frustrated, Ms. Thorgerson-White said: “She knows how to jump between screens, so why would she do the task?”
The researchers were initially disappointed with the results, but they were also drawn to Yoshi’s intransigence, seeing her as evidence of her personality.
Personality remains an acute problem. By limiting their study to chickens that were essentially raising their wings as a volunteer, they may have recruited an unusually bold bird population, which may have skewed their results. So the researchers are now evaluating personality and may try to repeat the study with more birds.
“Could they develop a protocol that would calm down all the chickens and get used to having all the chickens ready?” asked Dr. Mason. “Then their problem is solved.”
The researchers are also looking into whether animals on the farm experience symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, and if so, whether being in a shelter helps them heal.
“Honestly, it’s a normal part of farm animal life, almost regardless of species, they go through or experience the types of trauma that human psychologists use to diagnose PTSD,” Ms. Thorgerson-White said.
Some of the reserve’s inhabitants have escaped slaughterhouses or been seriously injured on farms, and scientists report abused or abused elephants and chimpanzees have developed symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder.
“If post-traumatic stress disorder exists in humans, then obviously it exists in other species,” said Donald Bloom, emeritus professor of animal welfare at the University of Cambridge. “So it would be interesting to explore that.”
The study was largely observational and included a careful analysis of the behavior of new residents such as Bella, a Holstein cow who died this fall after seeing her companion, a bull named Buck, be euthanized. But the team also measured the animals’ cortisol levels by having residents cough up saliva samples.
Lizzy and Robbie, a pair of fluffy pigs who love to bite on visitors’ shoelaces, are the absolute champions, happily drooling over large cotton swabs provided by scientists. But Hayes, a bull with incredibly fluffy ears, was completely reluctant to suck on a cotton swab, even when the researchers tried to sweeten it with molasses.
“This is the first time he’s been to the ranch and there’s nothing more fun and exciting than grazing, not even molasses,” said Ms. Prasad-Srekengast, Hayes gently nuzzled her at the ranch as he stopped.
The researchers acknowledge that some of their research may not succeed, and their method is still evolving. There are several obvious areas for improvement: they did not conduct a blind study of chickens, meaning they knew which chickens were in the control group and which were not. As a result, researchers can unconsciously influence the behavior of birds, especially if they want to achieve certain results.
“We tried to avoid unconscious cues by staying still, lowering our heads, and moving away from the testing area as much as possible,” said Prasad-Schrekengast, “but, by her admission, we realized that this was a limitation of our study design. , and plan to address this issue in our final manuscript.”
Dr Grun, an animal ethicist, notes that researchers can be unusually outspoken about their mission and values, but they are not the only ones who offer a perspective on their work. After all, many biomedical scientists have made their own calculations that the potential for alleviating human suffering is superior to that experienced by laboratory animals. “Values ​​enter scientific practice at all levels,” said Dr. Grün. “I don’t think these values ​​exist unusually – I don’t think these values ​​exist unusually.”