Why chickens. Is it by chance that humans settled on this bird for mass consumption or was there many other birds that did not stand the test of mass production.
Did humans miss the trick with any other type that may havebeen better than chickens at mass production.
Doesn’t really answer your question, but this is an interesting precis of how chicken farming grew from people having a few hens in the early 20th century to the present day factory farming.
There are other types of poultry. Turkey, goose, duck are pretty standard, along with pigeon, pheasant, partridge, guinea fowl, quail, peacock, and ostrich.
But yes, chickens have been selectively bred for thousands of years for human use, many of the other types of poultry have only been selectively bred for hundreds of years, or even dozens. Ostrich farming is pretty new.
The problem with choosing some random species of bird and breeding it for mass production is that the bird is almost certainly not going to be as easy to raise as chickens, because chickens have that aforementioned thousand year head start.
Up until about a hundred years ago most chickens were raised for eggs and not meat. Most chickens were only eaten after their laying time was over.
From a farmer’s perspective chicken are easy to raise because they are small and they roost. This means you do not need alot of room to raise them. Ducks need a nearby water source and do not roost, turkeys are too big and their eggs are not much bigger than a chicken’s.
This little nugget does seem to address the question. Chickens most likely became the domestic bird of choice because they were frequent and reliable egg layers. They were most likely became the food bird of choice because we already had all these domestic chickens around.
The Chinese ate duck. They still eat a lot of duck: that’s where all the ‘down’ comes from, for down-filled coats.
I don’t know if they “didn’t pass the test”. The same methods that suddenly made chicken economically available to Americans (remember, the reason Herbert Hoover’s campaign team promissed a “chicken in every pot” is that it was a sign of wealth), have also been applied to factory farmed ducks.
Ducks can’t, I think, actually live in factory-farm conditions, but they kill 'em off at 8 weeks anyway (???) so that doesn’t matter.
Chickens have been around forever, true, but as useful barnyard animals. Mass production of them has, as bob++ noted, been around less than 100 years.
Chicken outside of farms was essentially a luxury dish, saved for Sunday dinner or special occasions. The Republican party in 1928 made the most extravagant promise it could think of in a piece of campaign literature when it said that electing Herbert Hoover would guarantee "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.“ That’s how bizarre the notion of cheap chicken was.
Turkeys have since been subject to similar industrial farming in recent decades but are still far behind chickens. The numbers I found were 300 million turkeys a year in the U.S. versus 9 billion chickens.
Chickens just seem to have a nice midrange between too small and too large for cheapness, a lack of aversion to being cooped up, and few specialized barriers to growth.
Not sure how you define that.
Medium chicken eggs are 50 grams, with extra-large about 64g.
Meanwhile, small turkey eggs are 66g, going up to 110g for the largest.
So a small turkey egg is bigger than an extra-large chicken egg, and the large turkey egg equals 2 chicken eggs. I wouldn’t call that “not much larger”.
Of course, both are beaten by a goose egg, which averages 166g.
As the Good Book says, ‘when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick.’
I live by a creek that’s heavily inhabited by ducks. At about 8 weeks, they’ve pretty much reached adult size, although the breast muscles are not fully developed; in other words, they can’t fly yet.
I’ve had duck eggs. They have larger yolks, relative to their size, than chicken eggs, and their shells are rubbery and require a lot more force to crack.
I’d be surprised if anyone producing sufficient eggs didn’t let some of them hatch to grow and eat as soon as they reached sufficient size. Not the same as mass production though.
Even recently chicken has continued to grow in popularity. In 1970 it was the third most popular meat in the U.S. Now it’s the most popular meat:
I grew up on Eastern Long Island, and you can bet that they mass produced ducks back in the day. But the market for duckling shrank. Duck meat is less versatile than chicken meat. Ducks don’t have white meat*, either, so as people’s tastes gravitated to that, they lost market share. It’s also rather fatty.
But Long Island duckling, once a mainstay of good restaurants, is hard to find any more. I don’t think there are any duck farms still operating on Long Island, given the lack of popularity and the high prices of land (the farmers have a big incentive to cash in).
Duck eggs never were a big seller and ducks didn’t lay as many as chickens, meaning they were more expensive.
*It’s “white meat” in the sense that it’s similar to poultry, but the breast meat is more like the dark meat on a chicken.
The duck market is tiny compared to either chicken or turkey, but it’s gaining popularity in higher-end restaurants. I see roast duck on probably three-quarters of menus in that type of restaurant and duck comfit or duck quesadillas as appetizers are also far more frequent. I love duck so I’m always looking for it and I’d say unquestionably it was much rarer twenty years ago. And probably for a long time before that, but I didn’t eat at good restaurants very much when I was younger.
Chicken eggs are 50-75% as big as a turkey egg but turkeys eat about 3-4 times as much food as a chicken. So chicken is a better value to raise for eggs.
Don’t forget chicken eggs are much larger now than they were in the past. I don’t know about turkey eggs.
Also, how much space do turkeys v. geese v. chickens take when free-range?
BTW, here is an article on chicken v. turkey eggs if anyone cares. Haven’t fact-checked it.
A big factor in the domestication of the chicken is the fact that the wild version of the bird (red junglefowl) is essentially flightless (like a chicken it can fly up to a roost, but that’s about it). Much easier to keep around than ducks, geese, and turkeys (wild turkeys can fly).
Anohter kinda relevant data point (sorry, no cite): I recently read that among mammals, reptiles, birds (excluding fish, insects, bacteria, etc), chickens are the most numerous species.
But maybe they’re the most numerous because of their wide domestication? Your data point just raises a…
Wait for it…
Chicken or the egg question.
Where does the good book say that?