From the little blind hen to the monkeys blinded with coconuts, the game between animals is training for the unexpected

A girl and a young gorilla, named Yola, at the Woodland Park Zoo in San Francisco last April.GENNA MARTIN (Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images)

Starts the game.

They cover the little hen's eyes with a handkerchief and the rest of the participants stand in a circle around it, holding hands.

When they are ready, they ask, “Little hen, what have you lost?”, to which she responds, “A needle and a thimble,” and the players spin her around saying, “Go around three times and you will find her.”

From there, the little chicken tries to catch a person and when she succeeds, she has to guess his identity just by touching her.

If she gets it right, they exchange roles.

Blind man's chicken, with its variants, has been played all over the planet throughout the centuries.

In England they call it

blind man's buff

, in Bangladesh

kanamachi

and in Nigeria

kola onye tara gi okpo?.

It has been represented in illustrations on many occasions, such as in a 13th century manuscript from the Atger Museum in Montpellier, in a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder from 1560 called

Children's Games

, in a Chinese school book from 1912 or in one of the cartoons that Goya painted in 1789 to decorate the princesses' bedroom at the El Prado Palace.

Covering your eyes to play is so universal that even other primates do it.

The first to document this behavior was Alyse Cunningham in 1921. She was the caretaker of John Daniell, a lowland gorilla who, when he was just a baby, was captured by French agents in Gabon.

Cunningham describes how she would often squeeze her eyes shut and run around hitting the furniture in her house to play.

This behavior has since been described in all great apes.

Barbara Harrison, a pioneer in orangutan conservation, described in 1962 how two rehabilitated young males had a “handkerchief contest.”

One covered his head and eyes with a scarf and the other ran to tear it off and restore his vision.

When he succeeded, they changed roles and started again.

More information

Great Apes Are Pranksters Too

The monkeys also have fun with this game.

A recent study has documented that, around the Pura Pulaki temple in Bali, macaques (

Macaca fascicularis

) have the habit of using pieces of empty coconuts to cover their eyes while playing.

A good part of the individuals in the group do it, both adults and youth.

Macaques playing at blinding themselves with coconuts and cloth. Noëlle Gunst et al.

The authors of the study offer an explanation: everything could have started by chance.

Let's imagine that a macaque was using its hands and teeth to access the edible white core of a coconut.

Suddenly, he held the shell in his mouth so that the object covered his eyes.

This experience amused him and caught the attention of his classmates, encouraging them to play.

Seeing an individual walk around clumsily with half a coconut covering his face is very strange and curious, both for us and for the macaques.

The study indicated that the performance of the coconut increased the probability that a play event would arise between two individuals.

It could be that the older ones thus expressed their intention to play with the little ones without them feeling intimidated, like when a dog lies down with its paws up.

That is, it could be a communication signal, an incitement to play.

Clearly, one of the participants would be deliberately putting themselves at a disadvantage, thus balancing the game and favoring its occurrence.

These types of self-limiting actions during social play occur in many animals.

Lions control their strength when they play fight with weaker rivals, capuchin monkeys start the game from a lower branch than their opponent to give them an advantage, and gorillas encourage the youngest ones by making turns that make them more clumsy.

But this behavior has more functions than equalizing social interactions, because animals also limit themselves by playing alone or with objects.

Different species of deer make numerous movements when playing that destabilize them, such as bipedal posture or sudden jumps.

They are also placed on unstable surfaces that test their balance.

A study published in 2022 analyzed the behavior of belugas (

Delphinapterus leucas

) living at

SeaWorld

in Texas.

These cetaceans really like to play with objects and sometimes they make the task difficult for themselves.

For example, they place a ball out of reach and are forced to beach themselves to retrieve it or, while trying to push a buoy, they put a brush in their eyes or tail fins.

Other cases are more familiar to us.

The Internet is full of videos of pets who like to make it difficult for themselves when they play, such as cats putting toy mice or other objects behind the legs of the table while trying to catch them.

Other cats position themselves behind the open bathroom door and reach under it to reach the toy in the middle of the room.

Some dogs even throw balls down hills at themselves.

In addition to blind man's chicken, human beings have invented countless games whose basis is self-limitation.

In hopscotch, we jump on one leg to make it difficult for us to move, just like we do in sack races.

In dodgeball or hawkball, we greatly restrict the space through which we can move.

In soccer we have to put the ball into the goal using only our feet and in volleyball players can only take three touches before passing the ball to the other field.

That self-limitation in animal play is so common suggests that it has an important evolutionary function.

In fact, young rats that have not had the opportunity to play show a greater stress and fear response when faced with a novel situation.

Researchers from the University of Prague proposed the “training for the unexpected” hypothesis, according to which animals create difficult situations in a safe context to gradually acquire the ability to manage unexpected events, both physically and emotionally.

In this way, self-limiting games, like normal play, will improve the parts of the nervous system that control muscles and coordination, such as the cerebellum, but it will also stimulate the circuits of the cortex that control emotions and cognitive functions.

It is possible that self-restraint play throughout the juvenile period makes animals better able to cope with stressful situations by improving the areas of the brain responsible for executive functions and emotional regulation throughout development.

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