One thing that’s very hard to ignore about chickens, especially if your only previous experience with pets has been with intelligent animals like cats, is that they’re very very stupid indeed. Which isn’t too surprising when you consider that their brains are apparently the size of an average human thumbnail.
Or, as the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog put it:
Still, they’re unlikely to spend the better part of a day constructing elaborate death traps out of balls of wool by winding it around the furniture at ankle height, flipping up short floorboards to explore under the house and not covering the hole afterwards, or sleeping on the stairs in the dark. Feel free to detect the voice of experience here.
And cats are notoriously fussy eaters. This is not a charge that can fairly be levelled at chickens.