The sentience question
For humans, facial expressions are an important part of how we get our emotions across to others. Mammals including dogs, cats, horses, mice, and pigs, and have shown evidence of similar signals of emotions.
In birds, this has been a more open question. They can generate facial expressions by moving their head feathers and flushing their skin, but scientists are not sure if this is how they express emotions.
“Although long debated, there is now a consensus that birds are sentient beings: that is, capable of experiencing their life events and perceiving them subjectively (e.g., suffering, pleasure),” Aline Bertin, a study co-author and ethologist at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRAE) in France, tells Popular Science. “As such, it has become crucial to better understand their emotional world, particularly in order to improve the quality of life for the countless domestic birds raised for human consumption, conservation, or leisure, but also to shed new light on the evolutionary origins of sentience.”
[Related: Why you should build a swing for your chickens.]
Sentience is the capacity to have feelings. A 2015 study found that birds possess similar neurobiological circuits to mammals that can convey positive emotions. However, the question of whether or not avians can experience these emotions stayed open. When Bertin and her team uncovered that parrots have facial markers of emotions, she and her colleague Cécile Arnould decided to take a closer look at domesticated chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus).
“[They’re] the most widespread avian species on Earth due to its farming and increasingly present in our gardens,” says Bertin. “It is a bird we think we know, but in the end, we still know very little about the range of emotions they can experience and how they express them.”
For humans, facial expressions are an important part of how we get our emotions across to others. Mammals including dogs, cats, horses, mice, and pigs, and have shown evidence of similar signals of emotions.
In birds, this has been a more open question. They can generate facial expressions by moving their head feathers and flushing their skin, but scientists are not sure if this is how they express emotions.
“Although long debated, there is now a consensus that birds are sentient beings: that is, capable of experiencing their life events and perceiving them subjectively (e.g., suffering, pleasure),” Aline Bertin, a study co-author and ethologist at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRAE) in France, tells Popular Science. “As such, it has become crucial to better understand their emotional world, particularly in order to improve the quality of life for the countless domestic birds raised for human consumption, conservation, or leisure, but also to shed new light on the evolutionary origins of sentience.”
[Related: Why you should build a swing for your chickens.]
Sentience is the capacity to have feelings. A 2015 study found that birds possess similar neurobiological circuits to mammals that can convey positive emotions. However, the question of whether or not avians can experience these emotions stayed open. When Bertin and her team uncovered that parrots have facial markers of emotions, she and her colleague Cécile Arnould decided to take a closer look at domesticated chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus).
“[They’re] the most widespread avian species on Earth due to its farming and increasingly present in our gardens,” says Bertin. “It is a bird we think we know, but in the end, we still know very little about the range of emotions they can experience and how they express them.”
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