Matching Minds With a Fowl Foe : I.Q. Zoo at Fair Gives Critters a Chance Not to Act Like Animals

The kid was a video game master.

It was obvious from his swaggering stance that he had zapped millions of Star Invaders, destroyed thousands of Cosmic Robots. He was good. He was cool. And he was at the Los Angeles County Fair, playing electronic tic-tac-toe with a chicken.

The chicken won.

“That chicken cheats !” the kid howled, indignant that something that also comes fried in a cardboard bucket could outsmart him.

The chicken turned away; it wins eight of 10 games, and this was just another notch on the henhouse.

That’s what you get, you little showoff. I don’t cheat--with kids like you around, I don’t have to.

They call it the I. Q. Zoo, and in its debut at the fair, the coin-operated exhibit--14 booths of trained barnyard animals that dance, strum guitar, ride a fire engine, tell fortunes or shoot Ping-Pong basketballs for two bits a show--has lured thousands of fair goers, who find themselves amused, outraged, or, like the video hotshot, humiliated.

For Robert E. Bailey, who has crouched behind the booths with a hidden camera, the people are as engrossing as the critters. In tic-tac-toe, the animal may have an advantage in going first, but from there it is programmed responses: human does X, chicken does O. “The most interesting human behavior you can see is Friday night, teen-age boys playing tic-tac-toe, surrounded by girls and getting beaten by the chicken.”

Bailey is vice president of Animal Behavior Enterprises, an Arkansas research farm that sends several “zoos” on tour. Dozens of kissing bunnies and piano-playing ducks earn the “bread and butter” for the firm’s research.

Bailey has worked with the Navy’s dolphin experiments. Animal Behavior Enterprises’ late founder, Keller Breland, and his wife, Marian, were graduate students with behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.

Teaching by positive reinforcement, rewarding good behavior and ignoring bad, Animal Behavior Enterprises has taught a cow to play harmonica, coaxed a vulture into the title role in a huge cuckoo clock, and gotten a penguin to roller-skate.

Lion Country Safari once wanted a bull elephant trained to charge visitors’ cars, then stop short before the crash. “We wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole,” Bailey said.

Stripping away the show-biz glamour, it comes down to this: A chicken accustomed to pulling at a worm can be trained to tug at a lever on a gaudily labeled “jukebox.” Instead of scratching in a barnyard, it scratches on a mini-stage, and voila, “it looks like a chicken turns on a jukebox and dances . . . a new setting for natural behavior,” Bailey said.

An old man watching the Drumming Duck cried, “That’s cruel to the animals, fa’ crying out loud! They oughta get the guy who owns it and make him do that!”

Bailey sighed. His animals are inspected, doctored and fed and work 90-minute shifts. With 2 billion chickens going for drumsticks each year, Bailey’s birds “have a chance of living to a ripe old age in a very positive environment for a chicken.”

Bailey’s best showman here is William Dodd, 23, fresh from running a lumberyard in Hot Springs, Ark., and ardent in defense of his hometown show.

People “envision the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ with animals. We’re not a bunch of hicks getting a lot of animals to do stuff. They’re sure you’re lying to them, that you’ve got duck manacles back there and chicken whips to torture ‘em. . . .”

A woman rattled a stroller past the show. “Joanne, look at this!” her husband called. “‘No,” she said firmly. “We decided we’re sorry for them.” He made smoochy noises at a rabbit and reached for some change. “Honey!” she called impatiently. “That’s tacky!” He pocketed his quarter and followed her.

“Honestly, these animals are very lucky. The air conditioning keeps the temperature at 75 degrees,” Dodd said, with a dramatic wipe at his own sweaty brow.

In the Midwest and the South, where the realities of the soil are more apparent, “They know these are animals, not people in bunny suits doing slave labor,” Dodd said. Still, Bailey recalls an Iowa farm wife who visited the I. Q. Zoo and thereafter could never bring herself to wring a chicken’s neck.

But many urban fair goers, whose agrarian roots extend to a few scraggly house plants atop the TV, found the I. Q. Zoo a delight.

Nancy Wyatt and her mother, Lucy Stanley, both Iowa-born, were enjoying themselves hugely on their first fair visit after 20 years in West Los Angeles. Wyatt bade a polite “Thank you, bunny” to the Fire Chief Rabbit and told the chicken shooting Ping-Pong balls, “Magic Johnson you’re not!”

You were expecting the NBA? So I shoot 40% from the key. Big deal. At least I don’t have to slap high-fives.

In the corner booth, the dancing chicken had just finished, and a well-dressed man rapped on the glass in evident annoyance--was that all?

Oh, you want more, do you? Mister Big Bucks, with your fancy watch and that stupid little alligator on your shirt. Whaddya expect for two bits, Swan Lake?

A woman was assuring her companion, “I saw it on TV one time--as long as the chicken goes first, he always wins.” “No,” said an older man, “it’s done automatically by the machine.” The human refusal to be bested amuses Bailey. If anybody asks him, he said the chicken peeks around the corner to where a cat writes the answers on a blackboard.

One man bent to cluck at the chicken: “Bawrk bawrk bawrk!”

Yeah, so I don’t exactly sound like Winston Churchill. I don’t hear no Gettysburg Address outta you either, liver lips.

By late afternoon, a new shift of performers had been installed, the old one sent offstage.

Concessionaire Laura McDonald was on a break with her friend Terri Holmes. “Ooh, Terri,” she breathed, running up to the cages. “Let’s let ‘em all out!”

What, and leave show business?