Why hardcore animal trainers are counting on chickens to help hone their skills

Heather Hackney really wanted to take her dog training to the next level. She just had to get over her new-found fear of chickens first.

Hackney took part in chicken camp, a hardcore boot camp for animal trainers held at the Red Barn Event Centre, near Barrie, Ont., over the weekend. The idea behind the specialized camp is that learning to train a chicken will make you a better, more efficient animal trainer. But she had no idea she was afraid of the birds until camp started.

"They're very unpredictable in terms of movement," she said, shortly after wrangling a particularly flappy bird. "It's kind of been a double whammy for me to be comfortable with them but also train them."

"I'm still a little nervous but it's fine. No nightmares yet."

The dog trainer pushed through her fear with the help of her chicken camp partner, Claire Duder, a veterinarian and fellow dog trainer. The two worked with rookie and experienced chickens, training them to do certain tasks.

"We started with just teaching it to peck a circle and then it got food for every time it pecked correctly," Duder said.

Then they made things complex, adding more shapes and different colours, still only rewarding the bird with food when it picked the right one — what they called the hot target.

"It's like playing three-card monte with a chicken. We don't want the hot target ... to be in the same spot all the time otherwise they just learn to peck the middle one all the time."

Duder quickly learned that chickens are fast and trainers need to work even faster to outsmart them.

"It looks like we're training the chickens but actually the chickens are training us to have better mechanical skills and delivering tasks and making better decisions when we're training other animals."

This group was full of professional dog trainers from around the province, hoping to beef up their own training skills. But the camp is also frequented by zoologists and police dog handlers.

Katherine Ferger teaches the camp, a mix of classroom lectures and hands-on training with the chickens. There's a three-day beginner course and then a more advanced camp. Elsewhere, the technique has been applied to bunny camps to test patience and even guinea pig camps for scent detection. 

Ferger knows some people may find the method "frivolous." She said only a handful of people are teaching it worldwide.

"People do not take this seriously. I've heard just about every joke in the book when people find out ... and my poor husband when people ask him 'what does your wife do for a living?' He has to deal with 'well, let's see, we train chickens,'" she said.

"[But] chickens are basically a behavioural model for how all animals learn."

She said the chicken camp course she first took with American trainer Bob Bailey, one of the method's pioneers, was "pretty much life changing" and altered the way she looks at training animal behaviour. Bailey was the U.S. Navy's director of training and says he has trained more than 120 different animal species. He keeps coming back to chickens.

"A lot of people think chickens are stupid and I always tell people I have yet to meet anyone to come to one of my chicken camps and outsmart a chicken. It just hasn't happened yet," Ferger said.

"We have to remember chickens have evolved for thousands and thousands of years. They are very, very smart. Everything eats chickens. If chickens didn't learn quickly, they would be extinct."

'Chickens are not stupid'

Ferger owns all the leghorn chickens that took part in the camp, which roam around on her nearby property. The birds all have names but the students just know them by numbers. 

"It will give them preconceived notions about the bird they're working with," she said. "We have an Einstein and we also have a Cujo. So we are not going to tell a student that we're giving them a chicken called Cujo."

Students may have had suspicions though. Many commented on the speed of the birds, how they would peck all over the place and occasionally dive off the table.

"The chickens are fast so it can get quite frustrating, quite quickly," said Ferger. Some frustrated students have stormed out and not come back for the next day's class.

"We did have one person who got very, very frustrated and had a little bit of a temper tantrum by laying down on the ground and pounding the floor."

It took student Andrea Ferguson Jones a few days to wrap her head around working with the birds.

"Chickens are not stupid. They're just simple," she said.

"Chickens are really, really fast and it's going to be a lot easier to train my dogs after this cause they are going to seem slow even though I thought my dogs were fast."