She didn’t live long but taught us that chickens are not as dumb as everyone thinks

Thanks to a few filmmakers and researchers, animal intelligence is getting some respect, beyond the usual dogs and cats that perform cute tricks on YouTube videos, or Jane Goodall’s famous chimps that demonstrated how they can use tools, a feat that had been attributed only to humans. Now we are extending that consideration to some unlikely customers such as octopuses, chickens and pigs.

In the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” an Australian diver establishes a long-term, one-on-one relationship with one of those extraordinarily weird creatures and demonstrates how clever, wily—and affectionate—they can be.

More unusual is “Gunda,” produced by Joaquin Phoenix and called a “pure documentary” for its no-frills cinematic technique. The 90-minute black-and-white film has no dialogue and most of the soundtrack is taken up by the grunting and oinking of the eponymous protagonist which gives birth to a dozen piglets, plus the noises from three farm companions that included two old cows and a one-legged chicken. A lovely movie though even hardened viewers are warned to have a box of Kleenex handy at the end.

Now chickens are getting some respect, even from such highbrow journals as “Scientific American,” which in a 2017 article, “The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken,” declared that they are “cunning, devious and capable of empathy, among other surprising traits.”

After casually observing our own Henrietta—sadly for only two and one-half months—I agree. Neither Stew nor I are scientists nor did we have any experience dealing with chickens, but we were impressed how she could negotiate her way around our ranch, dodge our three dogs and two cats and other potential predators, decide where to lay her eggs, and switch locations if she deemed one or another place to be too dangerous. Sure, a lot of it had to do with pure animal instincts but certainly some of it involved some calculation and decision-making on her part.

We got Henrietta from Félix (see blog post) at the beginning of March when his mom complained that this too-industrious hen was damaging her flower beds and needed to be relocated.

I had read that when raising chickens you should not give them names lest they become pets, but Stew didn’t get the memo and promptly name her Henrietta after some cartoon character he remembered.

Henrietta was not a looker—not a candidate for the cover of the Barnyard Edition of “Sports Illustrated”—but a common, two- or three-pound white hen. I was afraid that she would not last long in our ranch, with our three dogs and two cats roaming around, but Henrietta moved right in, established a home in the shade of a pirul tree and a nearby bird feeder, whose droppings of seeds provided non-stop comida.

All this took place under our kitchen window, which offered a perfect observation perch for Stew and me. “Where’s Henrietta?” became the first question before breakfast.

When someone stole or crushed her eggs under the pirul tree, Henrietta switched her operation to exactly the opposite side of the house, under another bird feeder, but hidden under a dense patch of ornamental grasses. Félix would collect one egg but leave another to keep up Henrietta’s egg-laying. She became a regular layer, giving us smallish eggs almost every day that we would consume for breakfast.

She subsequently switched her laying station a couple of more times, until Félix detected that she had become “broody”, or ready to incubate her eggs. Because we didn’t have a rooster, Henrietta’s eggs were not fertile, so he brought a fertile one from home and placed it next to one of Henrietta’s, at a spot she had picked under the thorny brambles of a huizache bush, inaccessible to predators. Another survival trick she perfected was to spend nights atop a peach tree. I thought chickens could not fly and don’t know how she managed that.

We marveled at how Henrietta could just lie there atop her two eggs, apparently not eating or drinking, day after day. At the beginning we thought she’d had a stroke and died, except she would shuffle around menacingly if one of us approached her nest. Did I mention that Stew and I didn’t know anything about chickens? One day we discovered she in fact would take an occasional walk at the end of the day for a sip of water and to pick some bird seed on the ground. Félix later put a small dish of rice and a water bowl near her nest.

He predicted the one egg would hatch in three weeks, and in three weeks exactly, a motley-looking chick stuck its head, very cautiously, from under Henrietta. In the next two or three days, the chick became more adventurous but never wandered too far from Henrietta. Félix removed the infertile egg, so she would get away from the nest.

Then on the fourth or fifth day, the chick turned up missing and Henrietta dead, not far from her nest. I saw her only briefly. I can’t bear the sight of blood, particularly that of wounded, helpless animals. So I called Stew who reported that dead Henrietta was indeed bloodied, mangled and had probably died in a struggle of some sort. Did a predator try to get at her newly born chick and Henrietta died trying to defend it?

In retrospect, letting Henrietta and her chick wander unprotected—too “free-range”— was more than her instincts and smarts could handle.

A couple of articles I read about the intelligence of chickens warned that recognizing it will cure you of the notion that they are insentient globs of feathers and sensitize you of the mindless cruelty with which they are raised in factory farms, I suspect such as those operated by ubiquitous Bachoco brand here in Mexico.

In the U.S., an estimated 30 percent of the tens of millions of chickens produced yearly are raised “cage free” and it would be worth it to find out if we have any such growers here. I’ll do that for Henrietta.