A cognitive approach to better understand foraging strategies of the adult domestic hen
R. Degrande, F. Cornilleau, P. Jardat, V. H. B. Ferreira, L. Lansade, L. Calandreau

TL;DR
This study explores how adult domestic hens adjust their foraging strategies based on environmental conditions and available information.
Contribution
The study demonstrates that hens can adaptively use an exclusion strategy in foraging under high-risk conditions.
Findings
Hens showed a side-biased foraging strategy when food was not visible.
Four out of six hens learned to choose by exclusion under forced-choice high-risk conditions.
Changing the container did not affect the hens' foraging behavior.
Abstract
Foraging is known to be one of the most important activities in the behavioral budget of chickens. However, how these animals adapt different foraging strategies to diverse environmental variations is currently poorly understood. To gain further insight into this matter, in the present study, hens were submitted to the sloped-tubes task. In this task, the experimenter can manipulate the information that enables the hens to find a food reward (visible or not), placed in one of two hollow tubes. First, 12 hens were tested under free-choice conditions (no penalty for exhaustive searching in both tubes). Under these conditions, the hens adopted a non-random, side-biased strategy when the food location was not directly visible. Then, we divided the hens in two cohorts of equal size to study deeper the hens’ foraging strategy when faced (1) with a different container, or (2) with a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAnimal Nutrition and Physiology · Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies · Animal Behavior and Reproduction
