Preserve an Endangered Species with Heritage Chickens

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

So bottom-line home economics discourages home poultry production. And with the loss of the farmyard and backyard chicken flock, the strains of chicken bred so carefully for so long are being forgotten—and going extinct. Unless you and I and many others join the movement to perpetuate home-flock breeds, we stand to lose not only the variety of strains of gorgeously feathered fowl that our ancestors worked to create but also the varied poultry gene pool that holds the variety of characteristics that alone will assure that our poultry can withstand future assaults from disease and climatic change.

Other Advantages

There is, sadly, little commercial need for wide genetic variety among poultry breeds—and no need at all for natural birds themselves. What remains (aside from our home flocks) are a very few evermoreexquisitely-specialized commercial varieties. Egg producers are scrawny and nervous little creatures carrying just enough bone and muscle to support their egg-factory plumbing. Boiler/roaster breeds have been bred for the speed with which they turn grain to flaccid, watery, flavorless flesh with little distinction remaining between white, fibrous flight muscle and the dark, wiry running muscle of leg and thigh.

Scariest of all is what has happened to the wild turkey, a crafty bird that eats acorns and roosts in trees—the species that Benjamin Franklin wanted to certify as America's national bird (rather than the fish-scavenging bald eagle). The original domesticated but self-sufficient bronze-breasted turkey is so rare today it is on the endangered list of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which funds a periodic census of poultry breeds remaining in America. (Support them; see page 88 for the address.)

Today's commercial turkeys are incubated and brooded in electric appliances; live out their brief lives on computer-formulated rations and medicated water, standing on wire-mesh flooring in tin roofed sheds; and never see, touch, or taste the real world. Their plumage has been bred so thin the birds'd never survive a good rain, let alone a cold winter, and it's been bleached white so pin feathers will show less on dressed carcasses. And they are huge—at 45 pounds, several times their natural weight. So big they couldn't fly up to roost in a tree even if they could recognize one. So big they can't even breed naturally! Fertile eggs are produced through artificial insemination. And even then, egg viability—percentage of fertile eggs that produce healthy poults—is steadily diminishing.

The Poultry Biz

Brutal competition has winnowed the egg-and-poultry business to a few huge cost-conscious corporations. A mere three turkey growers serve all of Canada, and in the eastern United States, Tyson and Perdue control the majority of meat-chicken sales. In pursuit of profit, corporate geneticists are breeding out all the birds' native survival traits in favor of more efficient conversion of feed to egg or flesh. No matter that the shells of store-bought eggs are paper-frail and wouldn't survive a week of being rolled around in natural incubation under a hen, that the whites are thin and watery, and what color the yolks contain comes from yellow dyes in the feed rather than natural hen-produced carotene. No matter that broilers are bred to grow so fast they are freaks. Cooked briefly, the flesh is juicy and fork-tender. But compared to a natural bird, it is watery, flaccid, and tasteless. Plumage and musculature is unable to support flight, and bones are just strong enough to keep the birds upright through their preadolescent growth spurt to slaughter weight: 4 pounds at only 4 weeks of age.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print