VISTAN, SAMANTHA

ABM-11
WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF CHICKEN

It is one thing to eat chicken every day. It’s something else to have that on your permanent record, as in the
geological record, the remnants of our time that archaeologists or aliens of the future will sift through to
determine who we were and how we shaped our world.

But a group of scientists argue in a new essay published this past week in the journal Royal Society Open
Science that this is exactly how our time on Earth will be marked, by leftover chicken bones. We live in the
Age of the Chicken.

There are about 23 billion chickens on Earth at any given time, at least 10 times more than any other bird,
40 times the number of sparrows.

The second most numerous bird on the planet, at an estimated population of 1.5 billion, is a small creature
called the red-billed quelea, sometimes known in its home of sub-Saharan Africa as a feathered locust.

The combined mass of those 23 billion chickens is greater than that of all the other birds on Earth. But, said
Carys Bennett, an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester and one of the authors of the essay, it is not
only the mind-boggling numbers of chickens that will tell a tale of our times, but their shape, genes and
chemistry.

“We have changed the actual biology of the chicken,” she said.

Chickens seem to have been domesticated about 8,000 years ago, and gradually bred to be larger and meatier
than their jungle fowl ancestors. But it was not until production of broilers ramped up in the 1950s and
farming practices changed that the bird was transformed.

The modern broiler chicken, with an average life until slaughter of a scant five to nine weeks, by various
estimates, has five times the mass of its ancestor. It has a genetic mutation that makes it eat insatiably so that
it gains weight rapidly.

It is subject to numerous bone ailments because it has been bred to grow so quickly. And because of its
diet—heavy on grains and low on backyard seeds and bugs—its bones have a distinct chemical signature.

The broiler is also completely dependent on and designed for an industrial system of meat production. It
can only live supported by human technology. Eggs are artificially incubated and chicks grow in climate-
controlled sheds of up to 50,000 chickens, the scientists write.

The chickens are transported to slaughterhouses at no older than nine weeks (broilers at some farm animal
sanctuaries live four years or more) “where most waste products [feathers, manure, blood etc.] are recycled
via anaerobic digestion, incineration and rendering into edible byproducts, all technology dependent.”
Chicken potpie anyone?
VISTAN, SAMANTHA
ABM-11
There is, of course a question about how well all the leftover chicken bones, from the 65 billion or so
chickens consumed each year, will be preserved in the fossil record.

Bird bones do not fossilize well. But many chicken bones go to landfills, where they become mummified as
much as fossilized. And there are so, so, so many bones. The big issue, of course, is what all these chicken
bones say about us.

The essay did not take a position on this question, leaving it up to the reader. “Some people would say this
is an amazing technological innovation,” Bennett said.

Indeed, Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, an industry group, said the production
of chickens, in the US at least, is a great success “in terms of efficiency, the welfare of the birds and
responsibly producing more meat with fewer resources.”

On the other side, Lori Gruen, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan University and advocate for animal
welfare, said it was “hard to see this human caused transmogrification that purposely disables these birds
from birth as something to be proud of.”

Of course, archaeologists of the future will not just find chicken bones. There will be plastics, and concrete
and other so-called technofossils. There will be radiation signatures in the rocks from nuclear tests. All of
these will be markers of what some scientists call the Anthropocene epoch, the Age of Humans.

But the single most identifiable and significant biological remnant, these scientists argue, the lasting sign of
how we changed the living world, will be the broiler chicken, in its numbers and strangeness.

Ref.: https://businessmirror.com.ph/we-live-in-the-age-of-the-chicken/