Before I lock the hens in their coop each night, I always peek in to make sure nothing is amiss. Monday night was no exception, but I knew beforehand that the scene inside would be significantly different. Instead of four hens, there were only three. Nala, our Barred Rock, had been euthanized that morning.
Yet something did take me by surprise.
Snow, Hope and Nellie were perched on the roost, side by side and all facing in the same direction. Nothing unusual there. And they were still awake, as they always are at dusk. But they were not settling down like usual. Instead, they remained talkative, and there was an agitated tone to their vocalizing.
Snow seemed to be especially stirred up, clucking in rapid bursts of chicken lingo, stretching her neck and moving her head from side to side.
I had no reason to believe “the girls” were sick, at least not physically. In fact, they behaved normally the following day. But they were upset that night, as I probably should have predicted before I checked in on them.
Nala and Snow were among the first three hens we acquired in April 2012. (Stella, the third one, died that December.) Nala slept in that coop every single night for more than two years, and Snow was there with her during all of that time. As for Hope and Nellie, relative newcomers who arrived in May 2013, they had gone to sleep beside Nala (and Snow) nightly for the past year.
Suddenly, Nala was gone.
Why didn't I anticipate that Nala's disappearance would distress the other hens enough for them to display grief or confusion? We humans are not alone in feeling emotions, yet we often lose sight of that fact.
No less an authority than Charles Darwin wrote: “We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.”
“When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout,” Marc Bekoff writes in The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter. “Animals’ emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.”
