Now *that’s* a funky chicken
It’s a breed called Modern Game and it’s endangered.
There’s an article in this month’s Practical Poultry — or as Uncle B calls it, Chickens and Chickening — about Britain’s vanishing chicken breeds. According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, twenty species of British domestic animals went extinct between 1900 and 1970.
I never thought about that before. It’s not like plants; you can’t stockpile seeds in some cryogenic warehouse. It’s even more precarious than wild animals, for whom you can only provide the habitat and hope for the best.
For domestic stock, somebody has to be out there actively keeping the line alive and not letting it get fatally outbred or dangerously inbred.
Funny you never hear of endangered livestock breeds — considering all the howling and handwringing about endangered wildlife, where the number of actual modern extinctions approximates zero.
That’s because the eco nuts think domestic animals aren’t “real” animals somehow. Or, worse, they’re some kind of evil species traitors for cooperating with sinful humans.
Stupid hippies.
I just finished Temple Grandin‘s Animals in Translation — which I can definitely recommend if you find animal behavior interesting. She’s the autistic PhD who designs abattoirs.
When asked how someone who loves animals can build slaughterhouses, she points out — no slaughterhouses, no animals.
Or as someone else put it, if you want to get an animal off the endangered list, convince humans it tastes good.
July 7, 2010 — 11:00 pm
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