[silisili]

I'm not joining in on the ethics of meat eating debate at all, but as someone who's lived around chickens a good chunk of life, calling them extremely intelligent would be...a stretch.

Pigs though, definitely. Highly underrated animal.

[lisper]

That's surprising. I have no first hand experience, but I have been told by people who keep them as pets that chickens and cows are pretty much in the same league. Both can have distinct personalities.

[cheese_goddess]

I don't know about cows, but there's chickens in the farm where I live and they're the dumbest animal I've ever seen. They also don't seem to care when one of them is taken by a predator (something took one of our roosters two nights ago and the other chickens didn't make a sound, although he certainly did).

Pigs are intelligent and sensitive and they have compassion for their kind and other animals. A lady I know worked in a lab that made experiments with pigs and with dogs and she saw pigs taking food on their snouts and giving it to the dogs, who were intentionally left without food, through the bars of their cells. And pigs know when you come to take one of them for the slaughter and will raise hell and try to get in the way and defend their kin. It is a heartbreaking thing killing a pig. It is very unfortunate that pigs don't produce milk or eggs or wool and we just want them for their meat becaus there's no other reason to keep them around than to kill and eat them, unlike cows or goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, horses, donkeys, dogs, cats etc etc...

(I mean, we kill those other animals too, to eat them, but we also keep some of them alive for their other products or work)

[lisper]

Thanks for that data point. It makes me feel quite a bit better about eating chickens, and makes me redouble my efforts to wean myself off bacon. I already don't eat pork in any other form, but it's really hard to pass on a strip of bacon at a breakfast buffet.

[CallMeJim]

Distinct personalities and intelligence are quite different things!

Talk to a grower and they'll tell you that plants have personalities (this one doesn't like the shade, this one sulks after being repotted, etc).

[kuhewa]

Really dumb animals can have distinct personalities, which is why I think what gets inferred from some of the quirky behaviours octopus display in terms of intelligence gets a bit overrated.