Today's Document
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Cosmic Funnies
Misplaced Lens Cap
Product Placement
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
tumblr dot com
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todays bird
NASA
untitled
Claire Keane
Xuebing Du
izzy's playlists!
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
will byers stan first human second
Cosimo Galluzzi
Fai_Ryy
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@iwuvapplesauce
The Calm Before the Storm (Release Date, Finishing a Novel) - Development Blog #6
I finally get to share when this project will be released!!! Follow that link for that as I talk about the experience of finishing a novel-length story!
Do you have any theories as to why in the EQG universe, Rarity and Applejack have a thing for each other but in the Pony universe, Applejack and Rainbow Dash ended up together? Like, what aspects of the counterpart characters along with their respective universes resulted in the branching relationships?
Outside of your general chaos theory types of things? Nothing super specific. They’ve all had different lives and experiences than their mirror-verse counterparts; for one they’re all still in high school, and they’ve all grown up either in or just outside of a major metropolitan area. They all seem to have a much longer history together as a friend group, too, or at least going back to when they were much younger than the pony versions. So just those factors alone create a significant amount of change, which to one degree or another is reflected in their personalities and relationships. They are all different people than their pony counterparts-- Twilight and Flash is a perfect example. Heck, Twilight and having a crush in general is vastly different between the two versions of her we see. Genetically they’re the same people, but their experiences have shaped them all a bit differently which results in some fun deviations from the versions we’ve seen on FiM. :)
stop biting me you can get on my lap by yourself!!! I'm not picking you up
Silky chicken be like
Classes started on Wednesday... This is how my morning was....
I’m frustrated by cartoon depictions of chickens, which in my experience with the actual animal doesn’t even make sense as a stereotype.
comfey. soft
So sweet. So fluffy! So....making me miss my CHICKENS!!!! T__T) COLLEGE IS THE WORST!
bigfoot sighting
spread the word friends bigfoot has been spotted
Big foot meet Fluff foot
mom said its my turn in the bath
MOOOOOOOOM
My job for the last three summers in a (very awesome and cool) nutshell.
So many people (certain university professors included) are unaware of the fact that chickens can be “clicker-trained”, or trained using operant conditioning, let alone be taught all of these fairly complex tasks. Not only is it a great and easy enrichment activity you can do with your pet chickens if you have any, but it’s used by research laboratories all over the world to try and make important discoveries in areas like animal behaviour and neuroscience.
I’ve done/currently do both - I train my pet chickens to provide them with some physical and mental exercise, and I train laboratory chickens and turkeys for studies that try to solve pressing concerns about the welfare of farmed poultry. In my first summer, I compared the learning abilities of egg-laying hens fed diets with different nutrient levels to see if commercial diets impair brain function in these chickens. The next summer, I trained laying hens to peck a green light for a reward, while also teaching them to ignore a red light - exactly as shown in this video - to determine whether an “impulsive” personality was one of the factors contributing to aggressive feather-pecking behaviour on farms (no post about that one yet, as the results still need to be published)! And that’s just me. There are other animal behaviour & welfare labs at my university, and at universities across many countries, that use operant conditioning as a technique to objectively ask animals about their feelings, preferences, etc. The same goes for other farm animals, zoo animals, and basically any other animal used by humans - there is always scientific research going on to figure out what is best for them.
impractical jokers: a summary.
Sincerely have no idea why people get pet macaws and other parrots that can't thrive in captivity unless you dedicate your entire existence to bird care when chickens come in miniature size and not only are cheap to feed, friendly, lay nutritious eggs, dispose of kitchen scraps, and poop out valuable plant fertilizer, but also if you forget the garbage and are face to face with a maggot swarm they will happily devour the evidence of your incompetence.
Tonic Immobility
I’m a few months late in writing this post, but I’m glad I finally got around to it, because it seems like a pretty important issue for pet chicken folk (and any other pet owners, really) to be aware of.
There was a viral video floating around of someone laying a rooster flat on his chest, and then drawing a straight line right in front of his beak. For a few seconds, the rooster lies perfectly still, appearing to be “hypnotized” by the line. To my dismay, a lot of the comments on this video posted by chicken owners were along the lines of, “I want to try this with my chickens!”. And that’s fair, at first - it seems pretty funny that a chicken is #shook because of a simple line. I hate to be that person, but it’s certainly not funny to the rooster, so let’s think about what’s actually going on here.
Anyone with a genuinely decent understanding of animal behaviour will start off by practicing empathy, and placing themselves in the animal’s shoes/feet/paws/etc. Keep in mind, this is different from projecting our own human feelings and assumptions onto the animal, because many animals have very, very, different ways of showing certain emotions that we do. So, imagine you’re a prey animal, like a chicken, are you’re about to get eaten by a predator. There is no hope of escape. As a last resort, you “play dead” - flop over, and lay totally still.
Ethologists (animal behaviour scientists) call this behaviour “tonic immobility”, although it can also be known as “thanatosis”, or simply “playing possum”. Just like with any other behaviour, there usually isn’t a single, clear-cut answer to why the animal does it - this will always depend on the invidual, its species, and the current situation. Generally, tonic immobility in chickens and other ground-dwelling birds is believed to be an extreme fear response, when flying/running or fighting back are not options. While in this state, the chicken is actually on high alert, assessing the situation so that they’re ready to escape the split second the predator eases up on its concentration, thrown off by the sudden death. That’s why when you see these videos of chickens and certain animals “waking up” from tonic immobility, they seem to freak out and then frantically run away.
Tonic immobility has been proven to be such a reliable indicator of fear in chickens, that animal behaviour and welfare researchers actually use it as a common technique to specifically measure how fearful a chicken is of a particular situation. For example, tonic immobility (induced by placing chickens in many different positions on different surfaces) has been employed in various studies to argue that laying hens are more fearful when housed in single cages than larger pens, or when restrained by farm employees by hand than by a mechanical conveyor, and that broiler (meat) chickens are more fearful when they are on transport trucks for longer periods of time. And the list goes on. Hopefully researchers will be able to come up with a more humane method of assessing fear in animals like chickens, but for now, tonic immobility has been and continues to be used in many studies that aim to improve the welfare of farmed poultry, by figuring out which management practices cause less fear.
Going back to the original point, and repeating what I’ve already said in previous posts - always take a moment to think critically after watching a viral video like this one. Things are often not what they seem - the animal might not actually be having fun - they might be scared, stressed, etc. And as much as I hate to say it, the same principles apply to your own pets. Even if you think you know everything your pet is feeling and thinking, again, sometimes they show emotions in different ways from what we expect, and there’s no way of knowing for sure. I’ve also seen what is clearly tonic immobility in videos of chickens being held or pet by their owners - who obviously have good intentions and want to show their affection. However, a chicken, which will always have the instincts of a prey animal at heart, may not necessary feel that way and understand that affection, especially if they haven’t been trained beforehand that hugs and scritches are positive things. If you think you might have accidentally done this, please don’t feel guilty - that’s not what I’m trying to get at here! Hopefully you know better now, so put your empathy shoes on, and start building a more trusting and positive line of communication with your pet :)
References:
Cashman PJ, Nicol CJ, Jones RB. Effects of transportation on the tonic immobility fear reactions of broilers. British Poultry Science. 1989 Jun 1;30(2):211-21.
Jones RB, Faure JM. Sex and strain comparisons of tonic immobility (“righting time”) in the domestic fowl and the effects of various methods of induction. Behavioural Processes. 1981 Mar 1;6(1):47-55.
Jones RB. The tonic immobility reaction of the domestic fowl: a review. World’s poultry science journal. 1986 Feb;42(1):82-96.
Jones RB. Fearfulness of caged laying hens: the effects of cage level and type of roofing. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. 1987 Apr 1;17(1-2):171-5.
Jones RB. Fear and adaptability in poultry: insights, implications and imperatives. World’s Poultry Science Journal. 1996 Jul;52(2):131-74.
Scott GB, Moran P. Fear levels in laying hens carried by hand and by mechanical conveyors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. 1993 May 1;36(4):337-45.
