    29

    Schjelderup-Ebbe took careful notes.  When he reviewed them,

    he realized something surprising.  The order in which the feathered

    diners took their turns at the trough was not arbitrary.  Far from it.

    Every day, the same bird went first, the same went second, and so on

    down the line.

    When Schjelderup-Ebbe tossed a strange chicken into the yard,

    he made another discovery.  The normally peaceful birds quarreled

    like bar-room brawlers.  It seemed that the stranger was trying to

    establish a place in her new society.  That meant she'd have to shove

    some of the other birds below her.  And the already-established fowls

    were not going to tolerate the humiliation of being moved to a

    subservient position without a struggle.  They fought against

    downward mobility for all they were worth.

    Schjelderup-Ebbe wasn't content to simply watch the feathers fly.

    He kept note of exactly who was attacking whom.  And he counted

    every vicious peck.  When the naturalist toted up the arithmetic, lo and

    behold, another strange phenomenon emerged.  Some birds received

    hardly any jabs at all.  No one dared touch them.  Others were pecked

    beyond endurance.  They were easy targets, and nearly everyone

    wanted to get in a lick.

    The birds no one laid a beak on were distinguished by more than

    just their invulnerability.  They also happened to be the creatures who

    stepped up first to enjoy a meal.  And the birds who ended up with

    many a hole in their feathered coats had their own unique dining

    distinction.  They were always among the last in line.

    Schjelderup-Ebbe had discovered that in the world of chickens

    there is a social hierarchy, a division into aristocrats and commoners--a

    lower, middle and upper class.  The alert researcher called the

    phenomenon a peck-order.55    It  wasn't  long  before  naturalists  were

    discovering similar social orders in a bewildering variety of species.56

    Research on pecking orders (they're known technically as

    dominance hierarchies) has gone on now for roughly 70 years.  And it

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