What Chickens Can and Can’t Taste

Taste buds determine what chickens can and can’t taste, which in turn determines what a chicken prefers to eat. Taste buds therefore have an important impact on a chicken’s health and productivity.

Until 1904, researchers believed birds didn’t have any taste buds. By 1957 they had decided that chickens do, indeed, have taste buds, based on what they will or won’t eat. But academicians still believed a chicken’s sense of taste is not as well developed as that of humans.

In 1985 Israeli researchers identified 316 taste buds in broilers. That number stuck until 2016, when a team of researchers at the University of Georgia used modern technology to identify 767 taste buds in a chicken’s mouth.

chickens eating popcorn
Everybody loves popcorn.

Compared to Humans

In many ways, a chicken’s taste buds differ from those of a human. For one thing, humans have between 3,000 and 10,000 taste buds, most of which are on the tongue. A chicken’s 767 taste buds are mostly in the roof and back of the mouth, which is probably why it took so long to find them. Even though a human has a greater number of total taste buds, a chicken has a greater proportion relative to the size of its mouth.

A chicken’s taste buds are egg shape. A human’s taste buds are, well, bud shape — globular and coming to a point, like a plant bud.

A chickens taste buds cluster around the salivary gland openings. The exact number of buds, and their clustering, varies with breed and gender.

As in humans, the number of taste buds in chickens also varies with age, increasing during early growth, then decreasing with advancing age. The dietary preferences of chickens, as in people, are therefore influenced by what they are fed when young and still receptive to different flavors.

In both chickens and humans, taste buds are constantly being replenished. But the turnover in chickens (every 3 to 4 days) is quicker than in humans (7 to 14 days).

chickens eating cranberries
These fermented cranberry pickles were too sour for me, but the chickens loved them.

What Chickens Can Taste

Taste buds identify 5 different taste sensations: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (also called umami). Compared to humans, chickens are more sensitive to bitter flavors, which is why bitter things are sometimes used to discourage feather picking.

Chickens are less sensitive than humans to sour flavors. And they are far less sensitive to salt, and even less sensitive to sweet. Chickens apparently have no sweet taste receptors in their mouths, yet some chickens favor sugar and other sweet simple carbohydrates.

A possible sixth taste sensation, fat, remains controversial. Evidence indicates that chickens have receptors for tasting fat. Another big question is exactly how any animal detects the taste of calcium, which is shaping up to be yet another addition to the Big Five.

Individual chickens, as in humans, have definite food preferences. Just scatter some mixed-grain scratch and you’ll see some chickens picking out one thing, while others gobble down something else.

In both chickens and humans, the sense of taste changes according to nutritional needs. A dietary deficiency, for example, can alter a chicken’s taste sensitivity, and therefore its eating preferences.

Given the opportunity, chickens make nutritious choices based on their current needs. You might notice, for instance, that the coop’s calcium supplement hopper empties faster when hens are laying their best.

So it turns out chickens have a highly developed sense of taste. It’s just that, compared to humans and other mammals, what chickens can and can’t taste is just different.

7 Responses

  1. I disagree. Your premise that taste determines what a chicken prefers to eat is flawed. Humans have teeth and chew their food while mixing it with saliva in the mouth, which puts the food in solution, allowing the food to be exposed to their limited taste receptors and perceived when that mixture remains in contact with their ~9,000 taste buds. Chickens have no teeth, therefore, do not mascerate their food, they gulp it down whole, bypassing the tastebuds entirely. The opportunity for flavors to be perceived by their limited number of tastebuds is negligible.
    A chicken’s highly developed sense of sight and color perception is the primary moving factor when it comes to poultry food preferences, not the sense of taste.
    You have provided no support for several additional broad claims I challenge, namely: that the sense of taste changes according to nutritional needs. Given the opportunity, chickens will scarf down perlite in potting soil and enthusiastically ingest styrofoam- this behavior has no bearing on their nutritional needs, nor sense of taste.
    You missed the mark on this one- it is neither accurate, or helpful for chicken keepers to be led to believe that taste plays a significant role in either recognizing or meeting the nutritional needs of poultry.

    • Gail Damerow says:

      Hi Kathy! Nice to hear from you! To set the record straight, this is not my premise. Every statement in this blog is supported by research documented in the provided links. A lot of new information about how and what chickens taste derives from genome sequencing and other relatively recent technologies. The result is the emerging science of chemosensing, which studies how chemical signals in food items are interpreted by taste buds to determine what a chicken (or other animal) will or won’t eat. Most such studies related to chickens cite the purpose precisely as a desire to improve poultry nutrition. As to why chickens eat Styrofoam and other non-nutrients, my best guess is that it’s related to exploratory behavior combined with sheer boredom. On the other hand, studies on supplementing chicken feed with perlite indicate that it may reduce aflatoxins and other toxins that occur in contaminated grains. In other words, the chickens may be self medicating. We humans have so much to learn about what motivates the behavior of chickens. If only they could talk!

    • Bill says:

      Do you not recommend calcium supplements? Isn’t a chicken choosing to eat extra calcium an example of their nutritional need dictating a taste for the calcium supplement? You’ve contradicted yourself right there. By saying that chickens randomly eat anything put in front of them with no regard for taste they wouldn’t eat enough of the supplement to make a difference. Your premise that chickens “bypass tastebuds entirely” is ridiculous..then why do they even have them? Science and studies remove the whole element of how you “think” things work by actually determining how and why they work..it’s not a matter of “your opinion” that chickens “bypass their tastebuds entirely” but how their tastebuds influence food choices in scientific results. Like the observation that perlite may reduce aflatoxins in the chickens’ diet and may not be just a random choice by the chicken after all.

  2. Cate says:

    Interesting article!

    Anyone who has medicated a hen can attest that different medications evoke different responses. Perhaps this isn’t due to taste, but it seems reasonable that taste would play some part. I was delighted when a hen with a sour crop gobbled miconazole (vaginal cream), right off my finger. Trying to administer bitter-tasting Tylan (an antibiotic powder) was a different story; even when I stirred it into applesauce, I had to syringe it.

  3. Alfred says:

    Thanks for setting the Chicken Chick straight..! No ill will, I enjoy her stuff as well, but, I was just run off the site Backyard Chickens for much the same reason as her “attack” on your post saying you are incorrect about this or that. I’ve noticed an incredible stubbornness and resistance to new research, or approaches that “set in their ways” ppl simply don’t agree with.

  4. Mark Hall says:

    Miss Gail, thank you for your excellent, well-researched, and interesting article on the taste buds of chickens. Your polite reply to the above rude and combative comments is appreciated and is a firm testament to your professionalism. Again, thank you. I learned a great deal.

  5. Dana Berry says:

    Hi, Gail.

    Thank you for your thought provoking blog.

    To support your hypothesis, I found a research-driven article that states, “recent studies indicate that chickens have a well-developed taste system and the reported number and distribution of taste buds may have been significantly underestimated.”

    If you, or your readers, care to read the entire article, go here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5951165/

    Thanks again. Please, keep up your inspiring work, Gail.

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