Never mind the lion lying down with the lamb, it’s when the chickens attack and kill the fox that people sit up and take notice. Chickens, though, constantly surprise only because their behaviour is well-established among those whose closest encounter with these birds is a bucket of KFC as being very stupid and cowardly. They don’t understand anything conceived by humans, like electronic coop-doors they’ll happily watch closing and then wonder why they can’t go inside, or windows and wire fencing they’ll bash against to get through. It’s this inability to recognise the mechanical and artificial that, most of all, has them pegged as brainless. But they aren’t, not entirely.

I’ve personally witnessed an hours-old chick wobbling to the aid of another finding it difficult to hatch, cheeping encouragement and pulling off bits of egg-shell. That’s called altruism, the practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Science doesn’t acknowledge altruistic actions as being evident in a host of animals, least of all poultry, perhaps because it could be tortuously argued that the actions we see aren’t proof of altruism at all. Maybe the hatched chick was simply bored or operating out of instinct, and yet no book or article I’ve ever read told me to prepare for what gave every appearance of being co-operative helpful action.

And then there’s Alexis, our Light Sussex hen currently stuck indoors in a dog cage while she’s being treated with antibiotics for an abscess. She’s made friends with one of our cats, Jasper, who curls up right next to her and made the first overtures much to Alexis’ surprise. After a while she realised he wasn’t a threat and started throwing him bits of food to catch—not the stuff a cat wouldn’t be interested in, like pellets and corn, but pieces of bread and other goodies given to her as treats that cats aren’t at all averse to nibbling on. And the giveaways sealed the deal, cementing the cross-species friendship.

Of course Jasper will still kill sparrows and other small birds, including most likely poultry chicks, if he came across any—but a hen is way too big, and cats won’t tackle animals they consider too big to enter into battle with. Both the hen and the cat probably made tactical decisions of a kind, to befriend as a way of conquering and eliminating a potential threat to either of them. But a chicken and a cat have nothing in common, behaviourally, psychologically or biologically. And yet they discovered a shared common interest in food.

The fox that was killed by chickens must have been coshed over the head by the table inside the coop falling onto it. While he was comatose the hens, led by a fiercely protective cockerel, set about ensuring the predator would never wake up again by pecking him to death. A decision must have been made, on some level, to take advantage of an opportunity. Chickens look for opportunities every day—whether it is to escape confinement, get to food, or, in the case of males, to mate with a reluctant hen caught off-guard with her back turned. And if the pursuit of opportunities is instinctual only, then it might be said by alien visitors to our world that many of humanity’s achievements aren’t indicators of intelligence at all.

Some might argue that if chickens weren’t wholly idiotic, they’d never have allowed themselves to become enslaved, tortured and eaten in their billions every year—but humans have been and continue to be slaves as well, abused and mistreated. Those humans aren’t stupid, they are victims. So too are chickens. So too are dolphins and pigs, widely acknowledged as being highly intelligent creatures. Of course those who eat animals don’t see them as victims—but I’m not attacking meat-eaters in pointing this out, it is simply a fact and it is down to the perspectives adopted by choice or indoctrination.

Being a victim does not equate to being stupid. And a series of apparently stupid actions and decisions do not equate to stupidity as a defining characteristic. Those who love and care for various animals, from dogs to birds, are often accused of anthropomorphism—sometimes rightly so, when you see Hollywood chihuahuas dressed up in glitter gowns and treated like human babies, their canine instincts quelled and animal needs ignored—but those who don’t share that love are equally capable of something similar, in their case an ability to judge the intelligence (or not) of other creatures according to the same criteria they use to determine whether a person is clever, or dumb. And you simply can’t do that with animals.

Humans have opposable thumbs, for starters—it is these that allow us to do so many things we think are clever but are just enabled by our physical design.  Without opposable thumbs we’d likely still be living in trees and under attack from big cats and other predators. We are for the most part hairless. We certainly have insufficient hair to protect us from the cold. We are weak, we cannot run very fast and our young take far too long to mature. Babies are incredibly fragile for a long time, becoming only marginally less so as young children. We’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years but we still make the most basic of mistakes in our everyday lives.

So really, do we have much to crow about other than how lucky we’ve been so far? And luck has nothing to do with intelligence at all.

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