Preserve an Endangered Species with Heritage Chickens

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Gene Pool

As our once numerous native-bred poultry varieties go extinct from neglect, they take with them not only their unique mixtures of domesticity and native survival skills but the gene pool that contains an endless variety of characteristics that any species needs to survive in a changing natural environment—change that is liable to accelerate as global warming (or maybe global cooling?) brings home to roost the effect of our waste of CO 2 -producing hydrocarbon fuels and ozone-depleting aerosols.

What little genetic diversity remains among chickens is confined to the flocks of concerned home-poultry fanciers like you and me.

Indeed, a while back when commercial breeders sought a super-quick-growing broiler, they crossed Barred (Plymouth) Rocks with purebred Cornish that survived only among backyard show-chicken breeders. The Rock-Cornish cross is raised for all meat-bird sizes and the fastest-growing substrain is sold today as "Cornish Game Hen"—a marketing distortion, as the birds are only half Cornish, no more game animals than the family cat, and are young roosters (cockerels) as well as hens (pullets). When raised on high-protein feed, the "game hen" Rock-Cornish reaches 1- to 1 3/4-pound dressed weight and edible plumpness in a little more than a month, 4- to 5-pound fryer weight in 8 weeks of growth, and 7-or 8-pound roaster size in 10 weeks. They are still babies; a hen doesn't mature to egg-laying age till 5 or 6 months—20 to 24 weeks of age.

But when next a particular genetic characteristic is needed by the industry (say, a higher egg-fertility rate that will be essential someday if Broad-Brested White turkeys are to survive), it may not have survived extinction. Poultry raising today has become a monoculture as dearly as are the countywide fields of corn in Kansas or wheat in Manitoba, where every stalk is a genetically identical hybrid clone—all of them potentially susceptible to a new pathogen.

But plant science maintains a gene pool of wild and semiwild varieties. The Green Revolution of the seventies came when wild and cultivated rice strains were crossed to nearly double food supplies for the world's most hungry. And (so far) every time an epidemic has threatened the world's cereal crops, they've managed to splice in a resistant gene in time.

But, till recently, nobody has attempted to maintain a poultry gene pool, and authorities fear that a single drug-resistant mutation in a common disease-causing organism such as coccidium (a gut-infecting protozoan carried by wild birds and in the sod and blown around in dust everywhere) could decimate global commercial flocks before medication could be developed or a resistant gene located.

So much of the wild hardiness has been bred out of poultry that they are susceptible to normal environmental variations. Each winter cold snap or summer heat wave, you read of 10,000-bird flocks in Arkansas or Texas succumbing when their climate conditioning proves inadequate. In a brief power outage, they die from lack of water. In a really severe interruption of service (attendant to a major earthquake, fire, flood—or worse) these poor creatures could no more survive on their own in nature than could services-dependent human city dwellers.

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