Despite the strong link between farm animals’ welfare and their cognition (ANSES 2018), there is still a gap in our understanding of the range of their cognitive abilities. The process of inferring by exclusion is a complex cognitive capacity, which has been demonstrated in few birds categorized as “intelligent birds” (corvids, parrots). The principle is that when presented with two objects A and B (here two tubes), the individual can see that the reward is not inside A and therefore infers the reward is inside B. We tested this capacity in the domestic hen. With twelve hens trained, our results show that when hens can freely explore the two tubes (free-choice test), they have a significant tendency to walk towards the tube they can see inside, even if it does not contain the reward. But when individuals are tested in conditions in which they can visit only one of the two tubes (forced-choice test), two thirds of the hens learned the exclusion rule (significantly within 36 to 63 trials). Data suggest that motor laterality may be linked to success in inference trials. To our knowledge, this result is a first demonstration that the domestic hen is capable to infer by exclusion. Moreover, the study suggests that the hens’ selective use of exclusion might be driven by a threshold from which the risk to fail is worth the cognitive cost of the mental process. [abstract: corrected version 25/09/2023]