Poultry Science
A Humble History
By the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis
We take for granted our relationship with chickens. After all, more than 23 billion chickens live on the planet right now, and more than 65 billion chickens are consumed each year. That doesn’t include the more than 800 billion eggs eaten by us every year.
In fact, there are more chickens in the world than any other domesticated or wild vertebrate species in number and biomass. They provide us with food at multiple levels from mega farms to humble backyards all over the world.
Village poultry (i.e., “backyard” chickens in Africa and Asia) are an essential source of protein and income for millions of people.
The ubiquity of chickens wasn’t always so, though. In fact, until the recent African swine fever outbreak in China in 2018, pigs were the most consumed animal protein on the planet. The point is that the scope of chicken meat and egg consumption wasn’t always at its present level. So why is this so?
RISE OF VILLAGE POULTRY
From a historical perspective, humans have only lived in villages — as opposed to being hunter-gatherers — for approximately 10,000 years, and chickens have been with us as domesticated animals for approximately 7,000 to 8,000 of those years. However, the reasons we brought them into our villages are probably different than what we might guess thousands of year later.