File this under: “answers to questions we never asked,” but it turns out that humans, with a little bit of cluck, can learn to communicate with everyone’s favorite barnyard fowl.
A recent study in Royal Society Open Science shows that humans can intuitively pick up on basic chicken emotions—excitement and discontent—by the sound of their clucks alone. Nearly 70 percent of people could match the cluck with the correct emotion regardless of their previous experience with chickens, or lack thereof. This research reminds us of humans’ innate connection to other beings, and our ability to pick up on universal signs of happiness and distress, says coauthor Joerg Henning of Australia’s University of Queensland. “This is a remarkable result and further strengthens evidence that humans have the ability to perceive the emotional context of vocalizations made by different…
