Bitch by Lucy Cooke

Author:Lucy Cooke [COOKE, LUCY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

MAKE WAY FOR THE ALPHA CHICKEN

When it comes to social species, status is key for determining access to food, shelter, top-quality sperm – all the resources a female requires to reproduce. So it pays to be the top bitch. Males may suck up all the attention with their bloody battles for supremacy, but group-living females generally inhabit some kind of hierarchy, often independent of the male order. The first dominance system ever fully documented was, in fact, feminine in nature. A young Norwegian scientist by the name of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe introduced the scientific world to the very first alpha, which just happened to be a female chicken.

Schjelderup-Ebbe had harboured an almost obsessive interest in chickens since the age of six. This was the turn of the twentieth century, before young minds were bewitched by TikTok and Pokémon, and the young Schjelderup-Ebbe began documenting the hens at his parents’ summerhouse with such zeal he even travelled to visit them in wintertime in order to catch up on their social lives.

He noticed that during routine squabbles between pairs of hens in a group, one would peck the other. The pecker, generally the older of the two, would henceforth gain priority access over the loser to the best roosting sites and food. Following rounds of pecking contests, an overall champion would emerge and group aggression would cease, as each bird understood and accepted her place in the resulting hierarchy. The top-ranking hen, which he named the ‘despot’, would however routinely remind any subordinates daring to eat before her of their relative social status by administering a painful peck.

The young Schjelderup-Ebbe had discovered the original pecking order.

‘Defence and aggression in the hen is accomplished with the beak,’ he noted in his groundbreaking paper, ‘Gallus domesticus in its Daily Life’, published in 1921.

Schjelderup-Ebbe had hit on something big. Bigger than just a bunch of back-biting hens. The young scientist hypothesized, quite correctly, that this sort of despotism is one of the fundamental principles of animal and bird societies. Unfortunately, an altercation with a more powerful female academic prevented him from receiving the kudos he deserved, suggesting he was better at uncovering hierarchies than navigating them in real life.

Schjelderup-Ebbe had recognized that female hierarchies were far from trivial. ‘Fights among chickens, which are usually considered to be quite harmless, are certainly not so and do not result from a momentary whim,’ he wrote. ‘They put a lot at stake, sometimes even their lives, in order to win.’

This is true across animal societies, from birds to bees. The prize for clawing up the social ladder to alpha female status is a significant reproductive advantage, and it’s worth fighting for. In males the battle for supremacy can be bloody and boisterous and hard to ignore. Female power struggles are generally far subtler, although no less devastating. Which is probably why many female hierarchies went largely unnoticed for decades.

‘Females are not innately disposed to organize into hierarchies… primate males appear to be the archetypal “political animal”,’ was the woeful

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.