Oh that's a shame. While reading Ben's question I had begun thinking about a little chicken caravan hooked up to my car to take the girls on holiday... :happy:
But seriously one of the biggest follies any animal keeper has to guard against is anthropomorphism. In its widest usage this is the tendency to ascribe human form, feelings, motivation and behaviour to animals or inanimate (none human) things. It’s not surprising it’s deeply imbedded in the human psyche. From an early age religious belief is ingrained in a whole system of symbolic anthropomorphic form. God is seen as a human figure with super-human virtuous motivations. If a disastrous happenstance occurs it is seen as the wrath of god and due to some evil we have committed or if good fortune “smiles” we think it is because we are being rewarded for being ‘good’, heaven is seen as an elysian paradise and hell a burning inferno and so on. There are everyday examples of it all around us. They do indeed "call the wind Mariah" and the sun really does have his "hat on" today
Pet keeping is unfortunately riddled with it and is promoted by marketing to spawn a hugely lucrative industry. On this site you hardly have to look at more than a couple of posts to find examples of people referring to themselves as chicken mothers or their birds as girls or some such. I even find myself doing it, in a recent post I described a bantam as “our little princess”. All harmless innocent stuff you may think however it does have its dangers when we start to anthropomorphise animal behaviour we can actually be doing considerable harm. Take the above as a “humorous” example but there are plenty of serious ones which are not so benign. We live in houses with windows, comfortable furnishings and spacious rooms equipped for specific purposes like dining rooms kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms. These are what we think are the most commodious to our needs. We should resist the temptation when designing or choosing chicken coops to favour ones build to suit our particular prejudices. Unfortunately marketers know that we buy the things for our pets not our animals so they promote coops with lots of floor space for lounging about on, windows so our chickens can enjoy the view from their des res’ and so on. These aren’t driven by our chickens needs they are intended to play on our anthropomorphic prejudices.
Animal behaviour is not generally prompted by deep inner feelings or significant cognitive processes but by millenniums of evolution and the natural selection of the most successful adaptive behaviour. When chicken rush out to greet us we may be gratified that they are showing us the deep affection they have for us but in reality it’s because we return their show of apparent affection with a handful or two of treats. A form of conditioned response on both sides.
Learn to understand our animals and their behaviour for what they are and what it is and we will get even greater pleasure from that understanding and knowing that we are actually helping them to lead a healthy, stress free natural life too.
Just off to feed my ladies with their elevenses corn now!
HF