I know this!
You forget – I have a certificate in Chickenology from the University of Edinburgh. As part of the course work was a very interesting article called something like How the Chicken Conquered the World, but I don’t think it was this wordy article of a similar name from the Smithsonian.
Yes, the Romans had chickens and prized them. Ditto the Chinese. “The domesticated chicken has a genealogy as complicated as the Tudors, stretching back 7,000 to 10,000 years and involving, according to recent research, at least two wild progenitors and possibly more than one event of initial domestication.”
The chicken descends mainly from the red junglefowl, which came from around the Philippines, South India. That sort of area.
The way I remember it, there was one area that had a glut of food every ten years or so and the local flock would ramp up to produce an egg a day during those good times. So in domestic settings, where they were always well fed, they continued to put out a stupid amount of eggs.
When you think about it, laying an egg every day doesn’t make a lot of evolutionary sense in the wild. But it’s different in a domestic setting, when you’re rewarded for it and bred by the billions.
Someone once said, if you want to have a lot of an animal, teach humans to eat it.
December 31, 2025 — 6:38 pm
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