Were Chickens Always on Our Menus?

      Simply for the reason that there are about 20 billion chickens around the world and they make up most of our meals (for carnivores) everyday, research on chickens is actually very important for society. Chicken is one of the most used sources of protein in the world as stated in the New York Times article. However, Dr. Larson, a professor at Oxford stated that according to all the evidence, chickens were not food for humans back in the day and were usually only used for rituals and cockfighting. Chickens were way less important in the diets of humans for thousands of years. In fact, the domestication of chickens by humans is about 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

          The Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain gave many academic organizations about $3 million including Dr. Larson to study this type of information. His focus is mainly on the genetics and biological evolution of chickens. Yet, he has to focus on the reason why humans even decided to domesticate chickens in the first place. Chickens were the first species in which the Mendelian inheritance was demonstrated. The domestication of animals turned into major selective breeding of chickens to enforce production of chickens with good genetics. Sound genetic programs brought about the achievement of massive egg and meat production around the world. Dr. Larson denotes the different relationship humans have with chickens today as a “loss.” Though back in the day chickens and humans in Austria had been sharing similar environments and diets, now humans view chickens as a major food source. It was really so interesting for me to research about the domestication of chickens considering I literally have chicken every single day in one of my daily meals. To know that humans used to view chickens as animals that simply happened to live in the same environment as them and not food is really just shocking because nowadays we can buy a meal that has chicken through a drive through !