In the Guinness World Records’ chicken category, somewhere between the farthest throw of a rubber chicken and the largest chicken nugget, a fine-looking hen from Gabriola Island has staked her claim as the world’s smartest.
Lacey, a Hyline chicken, is a fine layer, but she’s also proving that chickens might not be the bird-brains we once thought.
Lacey’s owner, veterinarian Emily Carrington, said chickens can be trained to recognize shapes and colours and even do tricks with some practice and food incentives.
Lacey was so good at recognizing visual cues that she has earned a place in the record books for most identifications by a chicken in one minute.
“They are much smarter than what people think,” said Carrington, a graphic novelist who lives on Gabriola Island and practises as a vet in Duncan two days a week. “Chickens have visual and cognitive abilities, a lot more than what we know, and they are very co-operative when you work with them.”
Guinness doesn’t say Lacey is the smartest chicken on Earth — there isn’t a category for that — but identifying specific letters, numbers and colours by pecking on the right ones over a 60-second span makes her one smart chicken in its official book.
“Emily has been training Lacey for over a year and decided to attempt this Guinness World Records title as a way of showing people that chickens are smarter than we think,” says Guinness.
Guinness had a category for most chicken tricks in a minute, but the title was changed to recognize identification skills in a nod to intellect, which was a good move, said Carrington.
Carrington used fridge-magnet letters and numbers and colour patches, teaching four hens that if they pecked a specific one they would get a treat.
The treat started out as grain and then evolved into more tantalizing options like grapes or corn.
The letters and numbers, even colours, were initially confusing to the hens, but over time they figured it out: Pecking on the one they were trained to identify, and ignoring the others, yielded some tasty rewards.
Even when Carrington laid out multiple shapes, Lacey only pecked the one that brought a treat.
All of Carrington’s hens competed, but it was Lacey that made the most correct choices within a minute.
In the one-minute video that earned the world record, Lacey tackled tasks such as choosing the plate with three beads, ignoring a plate with one bead, choosing the letter A, ignoring the S, and choosing the yellow square, ignoring white, pink and blue squares.
Her only failure was choosing the letter B when it should have been the H.
Lacey was also scheduled to throw a foam ball with a tape tab for easy pickup and fling, but time ran out.
Carrington said she enjoyed going for the world record, because she wanted to prove that chickens not only produce food, but also make delightful pets. “They have a situational awareness about them and they make good decisions,” she said. “If they feel safe and you have a good working relationship, they are very willing [to please].”
Carrington expects the world-record certificate from Guinness in a couple of weeks. For Lacey to qualify for the record, the keeper of world records based in London required two official timers, two videos from different angles, a veterinarian’s certificate of health and two witnesses.
As she has done with other batches of chickens, Carrington plans to retire her latest batch to a larger “no-kill” acreage, where Lacey and her pals can roam free and “maybe meet a rooster or two.”
Carrington has produced a series of clips on her YouTube channel, The Thinking Chicken.
