Bird Brains Bigger Than Little Betty's?

Nick Kristof's Sunday column, just up, recalls his days as a farm boy, arguing, in the wake of the latest salmonella outbreak, that geese are more moral than humans and chickens smarter at math than the average toddler--on the way to declaring that we treat our farm birds too cruelly in how they are raised and slaughtered and maybe we should not eat them at all.

Look, farmbirds are not Einsteins. But evidence is mounting that they’re smarter than we have assumed, and just because they don’t have big brown eyes doesn’t mean that they should be condemned to spend their lives jammed into tiny cages in stinking, fetid barns, with bodies of dead birds sometimes left rotting beside live ones.