A team of researchers from INRAE found that emotions also made chickens blush. This discovery offers a new avenue for assessing animal welfare.
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The chickens have “more or less severe blushing depending on their emotional state”, this is what researchers from the National Institute for Research on the Environment, Agriculture and Food (INRAE) have established. Pink rising to the cheeks doesn’t only happen to humans, chickens can also change color at the level of the crest or around the beak, in cases of strong emotions. They can thus blush with pleasure when faced with certain appetizing foods or turn scarlet when captured or when they find themselves in the presence of an unknown human being. On the other hand, in a resting context, their skin appears much lighter. This is what INRAE researchers from the Center-Val-de-Loire unit have very seriously established. Their work was published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science, Sunday April 21.
To realize this reddening under the feathers, these researchers were helped by image analysis software which calculated the rate of red on the skin of chickens, where there are fewer feathers. To power this software, the team filmed the behavior of six domestic chickens in an orchard for three weeks; the researchers were thus able to isolate 18,000 images of these chickens in different contexts of calm or stress.
A new avenue of analysis
Knowing that chickens change color in the event of strong emotion represents a new avenue of analysis of animal welfare. At the beginning of May, the French Food Safety Agency (ANSES) proposed the implementation of new labeling to inform consumers about the breeding conditions of the meat they buy (a sort of Nutri-score with letters from A to E, to rate animal welfare in the production chain). Criteria such as the blushing of poultry could help to establish virtuous breeding conditions.
In recent years, other teams of researchers have also worked on the cries of goats, or even on the grunting of pigs. They succeeded, thanks to artificial intelligence, in identifying those who expressed hunger, pain, rivalry or, on the contrary, complicity between peers.
Ultimately, these scientists fully imagine that these discoveries could lead to sound monitoring systems in farms, in order to give alerts in the event of an abnormal peak of stress in these animals.