Click with Your Chick

I get quite a few notices about new books that are available and Click With Your Chick certainly caught my attention. The book is written by Giene Keyes, an animal behaviourist and 4-H leader, published by Fox Chapel Publishing, and available online through Amazon. It costs about $12. The book is a guide to training chickens to respond to commands. "Chickens are smarter than you think," says the book's promo material. "Your chicken can do anything a dog can do if you train it right! Hens and roosters can be ordered go to the coop, perch on your arm, come when called, and generally respond and behave as you wish. This book presents an effective training program to get domesticated chickens to follow a variety of commands. "Amaze your friends as your birds perform tricks like circling a cone, turning around, sitting down, and recognizing colors and patterns. Inside Click with Your Chick: Understand and connect with your chickens to effectively manage your flock; Clicker-train your chickens to follow fun and practical commands; Discover how a chicken thinks and socializes, and how to make that knowledge work in your favour; Learn how to use operant conditioning, luring, and positive training methods on hens and roosters; and, Gain insight for training any animal by improving observation skills and timing." ADVERTISEMENT Who knew chickens had so much training potential? Aside from being fun, is there a practical side to this? Yes. You have a whole year to get your flock trained and next July you can amaze thousands at Ag in Motion with your chicken training demonstration. Forget gentle cattle handling, sheep dogs, and attracting calves to creep feeders, trained chickens will be the feature of the show. The book jacket doesn't say whether the training technique works with humans, but I suspect it is worth trying clicker training with your kids or spouse -- fetch, come, stay, roll over, sit. Really, is there anything that could go wrong with that? From Grain News Magazine