Gallus the Gladiator
how does one tell the story of the chicken, the first domesticated bird, the worlds most numerous tetrapod, the most exploited captive vertebrate, the ones who’s corpses pile grows ever exponentially and incomprehensibly higher on brightly lit line graphs on screens and in dark dirty rooms, this is a story I must do justice, and for that I must start at the beginning and try.
the genus gallus contains four species today, the red junglefowl, found in eastern India and southern China, throughout Indochina, Sumatra, and across all the way to Timor Leste, The gray junglefowl of southern India, the green junglefowl of Java and nearby Islands, and the Sri Lankan junglefowl of Sri Lanka. this species was once far more widespread, with one fossil species as far west as Italy during the Mid Pleistocene, and others, most likely driven extinct by humans, living in Georgia and Ukraine even into the Holocene,
but it is the extant species that were crossbred to form the chicken, most of their ancestry coming from the widespread red junglefowl, but ancestry from all four species is present in the chicken, most notably the genes for yellow legs come from the grey junglefowl.
The red junglefowl is a polygynous species, with one or a few males in a mostly female flock, with the dominant male defending his territory from other males, and males more likely to live alone then females. territories are small, with roosts as close as 100 meters from each other. flocks travel in search of food before flying up into the trees to sleep at night. the chicks diet consists mostly of invertebrates, while the adults mostly eat plants, males engage in a courtship ritual called tidbitting, when they find food while with a female, clucking, bobbing their neck and head, and repeatedly picking up the food and dropping it, until the female takes it. mating will take place in the dry season or year round depending on the season, after all the eggs are layed (one each day) \, the females will sit on a clutch of about eight eggs for three weeks, after hatching the chicks will develop flight feathers in a month, leave to find another flock in two months, and become sexually mature in five months, In captivity they can live to be 11 years old. The red junglefowl is a creature of the woodlands, but they prefer disturbed habitat to old growth forests.
like the dog, the pig, and the mouse, the red junglefowl likely first came to man in search of food, drawn in by the refuse of kitchen middens, 8,000 years ago somewhere in southeast Asia, the role in these societies is unclear but seems different from common livestock as their numbers were small before reaching India based on genetic evidence, perhaps they were first kept for their colorful feathers, or for the divination uses of their eggs and bones, or perhaps for cockfighting, which likely brought them to India. The oldest evidence of chickens in the Indus valley civilization includes depictions of cockfighting, and an artificial rooster spur, a metal blade or spike, the kind used to replace rooster’s real spurs with more deadly weapons, And cockfighting has an ancient religious history in Southeast Asia. Cockfighting and chickens spread far and wide, in Northern and Central China by 1400 BC, chickens are present in Egypt and Turkey by the same time, and when the Romans arrived in Britain, they found the locals used there chickens only for cockfighting, not eggs or meat.
a domestic rooster has been bred to have a much higher fight and lower flight response in response to a confrontation with another male than a wild one would, generally “game” fowl, chickens bred for cockfighting, are often relatively wild looking, with natural coloration and a slim and agile, perhaps even exaggeratedly so, build, though some Asian breeds are extremely large and tall. game fowl tend to have heavily reduced (or cut off) combs and wattles, which can easily draw blood in a fight, and besides, what use is there in looking intimidating when stuck in an arena. statistics on cockfighting are hard to come by, but it is extremely common, in the US it is illegal but rampant, in 2014 a raid in New York uncovered 3,000 roosters and hens at one site. In the Philippines, nearly 30,000,000 roosters die in the arena each year. game cocks are often kept in extreme isolation from each other and are poorly socialized with other chickens, making finding homes for them extremely challenging even when they are rescued, That is when they aren’t merely killed of like nothing more than gambling paraphernalia.
Hand in hand with cockfighting, is sacrifice. In Bali cockfighting is excused from national Indonesian laws banning it for “religous reasons” and both cockfighting and more “standard” chicken sacrifices are widespread. the chicken is the victim of choice in African diaspora religious communities in the Caribbean and southern US, and are an option, if not a preferred one, among some northern Indian Hindus, and Christians in Armenia and the horn of Africa, the most infamous however is Kapparot.
Kapparot is an annual Orthodox Jewish custom, (though not a “sacrifice” in the Jewish sense) in which a human swings an chicken around by their legs or wings over their head, and the chickens throat is then slit, supposedly transferring the sins of the human to the chicken to be destroyed. Over 50,000 chickens are killed for this ritual each year in Brooklyn, Cornish crosses shipped in mass to the city, posing a disease risk, advocacy efforts have focused on trying to ban the practice over disease concerns, and in encouraging people to use a bag of coins instead of a bird.
The focus eventually shifted from the rooster to the hen, and to the production of eggs. Egypt and China were using artificial incubators to boost reproductive production by 400 BC. the chicken also became important in food production in Oceania, as one of only three domestic animals alongside the pig and dog, particularly Rapa Nui, where it was the only domestic animal, and stone chicken coops dotted the landscape. The Romans looked down on the Greeks and Celts focus on game fowl, instead using chickens mainly for eggs but also for meat, and Augury, observing living birds to predict the future. As many as 200 chickens would be kept indoors inside a dark shed, and sometimes they were kept in battery cages. In Britain they left behind chickens that developed into the Dorking breed, which remained for a longtime the standard British chicken.
in the 1800s new chickens were brought to west from East Asia, there specific origins often unclear, “Ostrich fowl” “malays” “Shanghais” “Chinese Cochins” “Chinese Silkies” “Brahmas” “Chittagongs” , these birds were marveled at, often for unique features, like the silkies downy coat, giving rise to rumors it was a hybrid with a rabbit, but collectively for being much larger, much gentler, and with much higher egg production than British chickens. They were crossbred with the Dorking and other local breeds to improve them, and became caught up in the larger Victorian frenzy that had them breedingever increasing and “better looking” versions of everything from dogs and pigeons to roses. most western “heritage breeds” in modern backyard flocks, as well as the Cornish crosses, Rhode Island Reds, and Leghorns that are kept by the billions in crowded warehouses around the world.
By WW2, the modern Leghorn hen was created, capable of laying an egg nearly everyday, and her feathers pure white, to ensure no unseemly discoloration of her corpse. she will hatch without a mother, dumped on a conveyer belt and sexed, (only 90% accurate), and spared the metal jaws that crush her brothers, her sensitive beak will be trimmed, so she doesn’t peck her sisters too much, and she will be shipped, likely without food or water, relying only on what is left of her yolk on her belly, to a large dark shed somewhere, she may live in a small metal cage, where the wire floor cuts into her feet, or she may have free roam of the warehouse floor, where, past the chicken equivalent of dunbar’s number, her kin will be particularly prone to violent pecking frenzies, either way it will be crowded, and dirty, with noxious and stinging ammonia in the air, and little in the way of enrichment. she will develop Osteoporosis as her body struggles to produce an eggshell everyday, making her prone to fractures in her keel and legs, she may get egg bound, with an egg stuck in her body, where it will break, go rotten, and kill her. she may survive, for a year and a half, or even two, before her body, struggling to keep up with her genetic burden, is no longer useful capital, and she is slaughtered like any Cornish hen. there are 6.8 to 9.9 billion egg laying hens like her alive right now.
The demand for only hens is a problem for the hobbyist as well as the commercial industry, the rise in backyard hens, especially owners wanting chickens only for eggs, combined with local rules in suburban areas against roosters for noise reasons, and the inaccuracy of chicken sexing, has led to an overwhelming number of homeless roosters. hormonal testing off egg fluids could more accurately sex chicken embryos before they fully develop, this is extremely new, seeing commercial applications in Europe in the late 2010’s, and first use in the US literally last month. but it has the potential to “spare” billions of chicks globally a year. Like there industrial counterparts, pet hens also bear the genetic burden of egg overproduction, and the egg binding, nutritional issues, and reproductive cancers, associated with it, but the drug Superlorin can stop egg production and it’s associated issues. For more Information on proper care of rescued chickens, and a warmer image of what human/ chicken coexistence may look like, see here: https://opensanctuary.org/allspecies/chickens/
an unorthodox use of eggs is production of the flu vaccine, the egg a incubator safe from outside contamination for the virus, and most flu vaccines are produced using eggs, 100 million a year, . the flu evolves extremely fast, partially do to poultry farms, flu viruses are regularly transferred between pig farms, poultry farms, wild birds, and the human population, swapping genes with other strains and evolving to suit there newest host, with disease spreading rapidly in crowded farms, before springing to a new species again, this is why the flu vaccine is annual and is so ineffective, as it only works against what are predicted to be the largest strains that year. In cases of a dangerous pandemic, entire barns are filled with foam to suffocate chickens, or the ventilation is cut off to suffocate and give them heatstroke. It is in the interest of protection from, and for, the poultry industry, that over 150,000 chickens with of eggs are used, like some sort of horrible homeopathy. Influenza is dangerous not just to humans or pigs and chickens but to wildlife, in 2020 H5N1 killed thousands of seabirds in Europe, and outbreaks have been documented killing anywhere from 70-96% of elephant seal pups.
like other livestock however, there largest impact on wildlife is likely the land used to feed them, Tyson 4.89 million acres to feed its chickens, expanding globally that implies over 170 million acres are used to feed over 68.8 billion chickens a year, an area larger than Myanmar. besides the destructiveness to wildlife habitat, particularly the American prairie, with temperate grassland being the most heavily destroyed biome globally. Most if not all the corn grown in the United States is treated with neonicotinoids, causing disorientation and mortality in bees and birds. in addition to all this corn and soy, every five “meat chickens” or one “egg hens” is fed the equivalent of one wild caught fish over the course of there life. All this food must leave eventually, and the nutrient rich chicken feces, as well as all the runoff from crop fields, of soil loss and excess fertilizer, hurts more wildlife, as booming populations of algae feed giant growing numbers of bacteria and other microorganisms in the water, sucking the water free of oxygen, killing fish and other aquatic life, left gasping at the surface for air. Chicken manure is particularly bad for this, as it contains two to four times as much nitrogen and phosphorous as that of other livestock.
The chicken industries focal shift from eggs to meat didn’t happen until the mid 20th century, alongside victory gardens, chicken farming was seen as a small scale means of supplemental food production, but was encouraged so that more commercially produced beef and pork could be sent to overseas soldiers, by the end of WW2 Americans were eating three times as much chicken flesh as before. A&P, a major grocery chain at the time, held two “ Chicken Of Tomorrow” challenges, in 1948 and 1951 , for the most productive “meat’ chicken , a cross of California Cornish roosters and New Hampshire hens won both times, weighing four lbs, twice that of the average chicken at the time, these birds very quickly became the standard, and the industry very quickly industrialized and grew, farms going from 200 to tens of thousands of birds. todays “cornish crosses” or “broilers” , given not exotic names from far off lands but names like Cobb 700 or Ross 308, or of descent from these birds from this contest.
in 1961, over six and a half billion chickens were slaughtered each year, already a staggering number, by 2022, over 75 billion, with no sign of stabilizing. these birds are raised in dirty, crowded, poorly ventilated sheds, without mothers wings to hide beneath, or perches, as they cannot fly. There parents were starved there whole life, so there genetics didn’t undermine there health, but they will grow fast, there legs struggling, and often failing, to maintain support of there own bodies, if they don’t die quickly, eventually they will be roughly handled, and shipped to a processing plant, where there heavy bodies will be hung by metal chains on there legs, swung around, and cut with a dull knife to the neck, those that survive the knife are boiled alive, at a month and a half, not even a third of the age of sexual maturity.
There is no hope on the horizon, the number of chickens slaughtered grows every year, not just internationally, but in wealthy countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan, and every continent but Europe, which peaked in 2020. they are the most heavily farmed vertebrate by far, 23.7 billion at a time. they are the worlds most numerous tetrapod, there combined weight being three times that of wild birds. and there lives are essentially all in hell.
but sometimes one must fight, not because there is hope, but simply because one must, when the stakes are high and the lion has you against the wall, we must fight with the furry of the fowl, fight like the rooster, with bravado in the face of defying odds, fight like the mama hen, guarding with outstretched wings and pointed beak her dozen chicks, for we have nearly 2 dozen billion chicks to fight for, perhaps one day tide will change, a weak spot will open in the armor, perhaps we can only mitigate damage, but we will not know unless we keep our beaks outstretched, eyes keen, and claws at the ready. and maybe one day the sun will rise, with a rooster’s triumphant crow.
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