No dumb clucks here

Lake Oswego’s Avian Medical Center training classes offers higher learning for chickens

By Cliff Newell

The Lake Oswego Review, Jan 29, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

VERN UYETAKE / Lake Oswego Review

Lisa Ewing, Avian Medical Center’s office manager and head chicken trainer, holds her prize demonstration chicken Toepick. Below left, Ewing prompts Toepick to cross over a small bridge on her commannd.

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Toepick struts around the Avian Medical Center of Lake Oswego like she owns the place.

That is because she is no ordinary chicken. Beyond her natural talent for laying small greenish-blue eggs, Toepick can peck a ball on a stick, cross over a little bridge, knock a ball off a tiny traffic cone, ring a bell, and step over a hurdle.

At Avian’s winter open house, Toepick topped herself. By pecking a power bar, she turned on the office’s Christmas lights.

“Everybody cheered,” said Lisa Ewing, Toepick’s owner and trainer.

Ewing is the center’s office manager, but over the past year she has assumed the post of head chicken trainer, and Toepick is her prize student. Or as Ewing says “our demonstration chicken.”

Certainly, the idea of a chicken school may strike one as ludicrous, ridiculous and hilarious. But that is a barnyard mentality.

Take it from Lisa Ewing, chickens are very smart.

“Chickens move quickly and do a lot in a short amount of time,” she said. “When you’re training them, you don’t stop and stare at them. It’s all about good timing. If you can work with a chicken, you can work with any animal.

“You’ve got to find a way of telling them that what they did is what we want.”

The basic chicken-training method is “click and feed, click and feed.” And make sure your timing is good. Be aware that chickens are quick little rascals, and you don’t want to accidentally reward them with a tasty treat for doing something you don’t want them to do.

Now that any doubts about chickens’ intelligence have been laid to rest, there arises another question about Ewing’s chicken school: Why even bother?

The fact is that chickens are becoming popular pets, and the Avian Medical Center, Oregon’s lone animal hospital that treats only birds, has at least three or four chicken patients a week. Avian veterinarian Marli Lintner even performs surgeries on them.

Why this surge in chicken popularity?

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