The Hypothermic Hen is still 'staying over' at night and with the recent wet weather has come to prefer indoors to outdoors during daylight hours too. There is really only one drawback with this arrangement and this centres on the learning abilities of birds in general. Although by poultry standards 'Hettie' has a remarkably high IQ, all the resident cats here are intellectual giants in comparison. To be able to grasp the concept of a litter tray takes even the averagely developing Hominid a couple of years to come to terms with. What chance is there of training up a chicken? Even an egghead like Harold the budgie (now sadly deceased) who might have been on the threshold of mimicry would never have 'understood', just merely repeated parrot fashion.
Rebuking the Hen for its inability to handle a concept as abstract as pooing in one place would be like belting a Dyslexic pupil for putting his letter y the wrong way round and we've all moved on a long way since those days.
2 comments:
Hmmm. Skinner box? Maybe you could rig up a digital scale thing that would reward the bird when the weight was upped by a couple of grams of poop. There would have to be some kind of hardware cloth screen for the bird to stand on, above the scale so that the droppings were the only thing causing a reading. One word of caution: if the results were anything like Skinner's pidgeon bar-press experiments, I could imagine the poor thing hovering over the scale, straining ...
Yes, well, I don't know if I'd want to burden her with such a complex?
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