Domestication effects on the human-chicken relationship
Hello world! My name is Ruth, and I’m an early-career ethologist from the United States. In 2021, I traveled all the way to Sweden to study CHICKENS.
I have been working with animals for over a decade, both in the lab and the field. In 2020, I got some backyard chickens, and immediately fell in love with this curious and charismatic species. I wanted to better understand how these birds experienced the world around them, and my personal research on their physiology and behavior led me to discover the work of Per Jensen’s lab at Linköping University.
That’s how I got here. But enough about me, let’s get into some chicken science!
My thesis project focuses on a relatively unstudied aspect of chicken behavior: the relationship between this animal and the human caretakers that they interact with daily. In the following pages, I’ll go in depth about this research and what I found. Enjoy!