the kindness of chickens

It has been reported today on the BBC and in the press that domestic chickens show signs of empathy.  A mother hen, seeing a disagreeable stimulus administered to her chicks (nothing too cruel, just an annoying puff of air to the feathers) shows measurable physiological signs of stress.  She 'feels their pain'.  This doesn't surprise me.  A while back I heard a fearsome racket coming from the chicken run and went to see what was upsetting them so much, fully expecting to find a fox trying to break in.  Instead I found that the big tabby was slaughtering a pigeon just by the hens' living quarters (it can't have been a very well pigeon to let itself be caught by the cat).  The hens were shrieking at the tops of their voices, and took a while to calm down after the grizzly deed was done and the corpse had been cleared away.  On a later date when a small rabbit met the same fate in front of them they were quite unmoved, so it seems their empathy extends to some other bird species, but not necessarily mammals.

Also when the old rooster fell over dead in his run one morning, his two ladies moped about looking disconsolate for a couple of days, so I think they must have missed him in some way.  We'd had him for six years, and he was already fully grown with spurs when we got him, so he must have been seven if not eight, which is a good age for a chicken.  In his last months he used to have to go to bed very early, and he would sometimes lose his balance or concentration and start walking backwards, which seemed to worry him, but he remained a gentleman to the end.  He was buried wrapped in a Thomas Pink shirt, under two paving slabs to stop the fox digging him up, and we missed him too.

We celebrated Pancake day with pancakes for supper (lemon and sugar), and did our bit to use up our supplies of eggs before the start of Lent by having omelette for lunch as well.  Given that the chickens are beginning to really get into their stride now with the eggs, if we were to forego eggs for the next forty days (we're not) we'd have an awful lot of eggs by the end of it.  I don't know what people used to with the eggs laid during Lent.  Pickle them?