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OVC prof gets plenty of media play over her PhD research on sex and roosters
BY LORI BONA HUNT
Prof. Suzanne Millman, Population Medicine, never imagined that she'd be talking about her PhD topic with the national media. In fact, there was a time when she was afraid she wouldn't be able to discuss it with anyone.
“I remember back when I was deciding whether to do this subject, I kept thinking: ‘I'll never feel comfortable talking about sex and roosters,'” she says.
But lately it seems that sex and roosters is what Millman has been talking about most. Maybe it's because she's had some time to get used to her subject matter. It's been six years since she defended her dissertation on the changing mating habits of poultry.
She looked at why some breeds of roosters were abandoning traditional “courting” habits and becoming more sexually aggressive, a change that was leaving some hens hurt and troubling animal behaviourists and the poultry industry. “I was trying to find out what was going wrong,” she says.
Millman determined that genetics — breeding to get roosters with large, meatier breasts — was probably to blame. The research was met with great interest by many people in the animal behaviour and animal welfare world, but it didn't catch the attention of the mainstream media until recently.
It started in March when Maclean's magazine ran a photo of Millman holding a rooster to accompany an article on animal welfare research. The photo was taken when she was a doctoral student at Guelph working with renowned animal welfare professor Ian Duncan.
“Poultry wasn't even my area of expertise,” Millman says, explaining that her specialty at the time was swine. But when funding for a pig project fell through, Duncan approached her about finishing a study on sex and roosters. After some initial hesitation, she agreed. “It was the luck of the draw that I ended up getting a great research subject.”
After finishing her doctorate, Millman went to work for the Humane Society in Washington for seven years before returning to Guelph. A member of U of G's Animal Behaviour and Welfare Research Group, she studies fundamental questions about how injury and illness affect behavioral needs and social dynamics of domesticated animals, and how to assess and improve the welfare of livestock and horses.
Sex and roosters was on the back burner, but when Maclean's ran that photo, it caught the attention of a Canadian Press writer, who got in touch with her. He wrote an article that was published around the country, including in the Globe and Mail, National Post and Vancouver Sun. That led to Millman doing interviews with local and national radio programs, including CBC's As It Happens.
“People have been taking some pretty funny angles on the story, talking about aggressive males with big breasts,” she laughs.
Although she has turned her research attention to horses and once again to swine, U of G research on sex and roosters is continuing. Colleen Doherty, a graduate student in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science, is taking Millman's work one step further. For her master's thesis, which she just defended, Doherty looked at whether roosters who live with hens can learn to get along better with the opposite sex. Although she saw some improvement, the roosters continued to be aggressive, especially the larger ones.
Millman still believes breeding is the cause and speculates that roosters with large breasts are less agile, which hampers their ability to court females. Courting can include pecking the ground, food calls, kicking up shavings and even “waltzing” around. She says larger roosters may be more clumsy and unable to perform some of these manoeuvres, which are typically used to coax a hen into submission.
“Considering that I once worried I'd never be able to talk about any of this out loud, I've come a long way,” she says.
