Domestic chicks are attracted to a familiar odorant in a novel test situation: a brief report

The fact that chickens modulate their behaviour in response to olfactory cu es has important implications for their husbandry and welfare. For example, if chicks formed attachments to artificial odorants during rearing their i ncorporation in otherwise unfamiliar situations might reduce potentially ha rmful fear and neophobia associated with exposure to novel places, people, food and things. Previous studies suggested that chicks formed olfactory at tachments to geraniol, orange oil and clove oil but not to garlic; such lab ility might reflect differences in the background genome, the odorant or th e experimental context. Therefore, the present study was designed to determ ine if this phenomenon would generalise to include a different strain (ISA Brown), odorant (vanillin) and method of presentation (petri dish). In Expe riment 1, naive Ii-day-old chicks showed no preferences when vanillin and a coloured water control were presented simultaneously at opposite sides of a test box. Thus, vanillin possessed no attractive or aversive properties p er se. Conversely, when it was incorporated in the home cage throughout rea ring in Experiment 2, the chicks moved rewards the vanillin zone of the tes t box first, made significantly more entries into it and spent longer there than in the zone containing the coloured water. The present findings confi rm the existence of olfactory memories in the domestic fowl. They also prov ide further evidence that domestic chicks are attracted to familiar rearing odorants in otherwise unfamiliar situations, regardless of the strain or t he method of odour presentation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.