If you’ve ever been to a farm (or a homestead!), you’ve probably noticed that chickens are almost never kept alone. Their ...

When someone tells you where you stand in a pecking order, they are allocating you a place in a hierarchy. You may not be happy about it, but at least you know your place! Dominance hierarchies are ...

But they do have their own ways of maintaining social order, which seem to have served their needs well enough over millennia. It’s a bit authoritarian by our standards, but the pecking order – in ...