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I do own two chickens since maybe 6 months for random reasons. Before that I thought they were pretty "stupid"/"uninteresting" animals but I was really wrong.

They are in fact very lovable little beings. They have interestingly complex relationships between them, they are very social and I do have a special bond with the first I got, especially because we hadn’t the necessary hardware to keep her hot enough for multiple days, we had to literally keep her warm between our hands.

Now she is a grown up chicken and she loves it when I go outside.

Also they are in fact pretty intelligent animals, and they are really curious about what happens around them.

I’d ever go as far as saying that they could be the perfect household pets if only the evolution gave them sphincters.

That was a nice personal discovery.

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As a small child, I used to spend a part of the summer vacations with my grandparents, who had some land cultivated with a variety of crops and trees and they also raised some animals, including chicken which roamed freely through a big garden.

I liked to play with the chicken, and by rewarding them with maize grains I have succeeded to train some of them to respond to a few simple commands, like coming to me when called and sitting down, waiting to be petted, and standing up upon commands. (Because those chicken were used to roam freely, they were shy of human contact. Normally it was difficult to catch any one of them.)

My grandparents and their neighbors were astonished, despite the fact that they have kept chicken for all their lives, because they believed that chicken are too dumb to act like this.

My understanding is that birds are about as intelligent as mammals.

Funny I know some people who grew up with chickens who think they are nasty, aggressive and disagreeable. Like little dragons.

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