I was enjoying an omelet this morning when my boyfriend asked me if there are any societies that do not consume poultry, whether by choice or by lack of continuous access to the food source. Anyone?
I gave some thought to nomads/itinerants and the lack of efficiency in keeping chickens, but I’m not entirely sure if that is true.
I was going to suggest the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, but they consume ostrich eggs.
I assume that by “poultry” the OP means domesticated birds, especially chickens, rather than just bird eggs. I’m pretty sure any culture will consume bird eggs of appropriate size.
Of course Inuit would not have had poultry before modern times. Neither did the Maori of New Zealand before the arrival of humans. Both collected and used seabird eggs, however.
the Maori aren’t humans?
Tibetans (well, at least the nomads and those in the high country).
Oops. I meant Europeans, of course. New Zealand had no chicken-type birds before the arrival of humans; the only animals the Maoris brought with them were dogs and rats.
Wouldn’t the NZ equivalent of the chicken be the kiwi?
I thought there was a Tibetan chicken breed.
No, chickens are much more closely related to penguins and pelicans than they are to kiwis. The closest relative to chickens in NZ was a small quail that became extinct after the arrival of Europeans.
There might be. That said, I never saw chickens with the nomads nor in the high country. Lower lying border areas had chickens.
Nomads have yaks, horses, possibly goats and a few dogs.
Yes, I’m aware that kiwi are ratites. However, they are roughly chicken-sized, omnivorous, and would be easily contained in captivity, so I am curious if they could function as “poultry”. Maybe their slow reproductive cycle makes them unsuitable for domestication.
Given that a female produces a single egg a year, no, they’re not a good candidate for domestication if you want to have omelets much more frequently than that. (They lay the largest egg in proportion to body size of any bird, about a quarter of the female’s weight.) And while they do eat some seeds, they rely mainly on animal food like worms and grubs, which would make them difficult to maintain in large numbers.
The Abominable Leghorn.
Though the Maori did hunt the moa into extinction. If anything, that’s an excessive gusto for eating poultry.
Did Americans have chickens before Europeans arrived?
Possibly the nomadic Tuaregs of the Sahara.
Do chickens eat chicken? Just asking.
Yes, though probably not for long. Polynesians introduced chickens to South America, presumably via Easter Island, but probably only a few hundred years before Columbus.
Eskimos?