The broiler chicken is the quintessence of the modern meat complex. In 1925 the average chicken brought to slaughter was 112 days old, ate 4.7 pounds of feed for every pound of liveweight chicken, and weighed 2.5 pounds when its neck was wrung. Today, an industrially raised chicken lives to 47 days, takes only 1.69 pounds of feed for every pound of chicken, and reaches 6.57 pounds.
The bird is an unsteady scaffold for its ponderous breast. When they are finished growing, chickens are shoveled (or scooped by a harvester that has been compared to a Zamboni) into boxes and shipped to a processing facility, where Benjamin Ward Richardson’s vision of electronarcosis is carried to its mechanized extreme: The birds are strapped into conveyor belts, flipped upside down, plunged headfirst into water, then washed in an electrical bath. The stunned animals are then decapitated.
Chickens are killed by the billions (about seventy-five billion every year), and poultry has become the world’s most consumed meat. If curious extraterrestrial visitors were to reconnoiter Earth, they might well be struck by a planet that nurtures such an inordinate number of chickens. Chickens are the most numerous bird on the planet by a factor of ten, and there are about four of them for every one of us.
We keep them warm, feed them, and tend to their prodigious piles of excrement. If evolution keeps score by counting genetic replication, then chickens have run away with the game, although their success is, in the words of one scientist, “the most heavily qualified of victories,” the fate of blinking alive just long enough to be turned into a nugget. Whether or not aliens ever observe our curious symbiosis with the chicken, we can believe that someone will puzzle at it.
Millions of years from now, the fossilized bones of the artificially evolved broiler chicken will be left behind in the Earth’s crust as a geological tracer of human dominance. Bird bones, in general, tend not to fossilize well. Our future geologists would need sensitive instruments and generous luck to detect the wave of avian extinctions since the late Pleistocene—La Brea storks and moas, dodos and auks, passenger pigeons and Mariana mallards, and more than a thousand others.
The lesser prairie chicken will be invisible. But the sudden evolution of the improbably shaped and hyperabundant broiler chicken will be unmissable because the osseous debris of our fowl hunger—drumsticks and wing bones and oversized sternums—winds its way into landfills. There, in these gaping anaerobic middens, their bones mummify.
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