Monday, April 8, 2019

Big Chicken and the Anthropocene.

Broiler chickens, in particular. The broiler chicken is the most popular breed of chicken produced by modern humans. If you go to a supermarket in any modern country, and see a chicken (dead, though living chickens are a thing too), it's probably broiler chicken.

Humans make lots of broiler chickens. 23 billion are alive at any instant, and each lives about 40 days (they grow extremely fast).

From ScienceDaily:
These chickens are an artificially evolved new 'morphospecies', the kind of thing palaeontologists recognise, that reflect a biosphere unrecognisable from its pre-human state and now dominated by human consumption and resource use.
"Since domestication there have been many strange and beautiful chicken breeds, but the broiler is perhaps the most extreme form of all. The body shape, bone chemistry and genetics of the modern meat chicken is unrecognisable from wild ancestors and anything we see in the archaeological record." 
It usually takes millions of years for evolution to occur, but here it has taken just decades to produce a new form of animal that has the potential to become a marker species of the Anthropocene -- and the enormous numbers of these chicken bones discarded worldwide means that we are producing a new kind of fossil for the future geological record.

In the future, they will dig up trillions of broiler chicken fossils...

I went into some reading of modern human industrial production of animals mostly because I was annoyed by some meat lobbyist's claim:
We must continue to articulate how well animals are treated by farmers.
We must share why raising animals is good for the environment.
We must continue to educate consumers on why livestock products are nutritionally superior for us and our children.
My replies are

  1. Farmers may be nice, but how about factory farming? Most chicken meat (see below) and about 10% of American production of cattle meat is from factory farming. (Didn't check pig production, but I'd guess around 50% is from factory farming.)
  2. In a limited amount, certainly, but only in greatly reduced amount. People would have to eat a lot less meat, and fake meat would help accelerate the transition. In particular, according to Carrying Capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios (2016), the diet with the highest carrying capacity (how many people can live on the land sustainably) is the lacto-vegetarian diet, and vegan diet came fourth (behind "omni 20" and "omni 40", two situations where 80% and 60% of meat is replaced with plant foods)
  3. False. Refer to Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets (2016)

From Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America (2011):
During the early part of the 20th century, chickens were raised on small farms throughout the United States, and their meat was principally a byproduct of the egg industry. However, production of broilers [in America]— young chickens raised specifically for meat—nearly tripled between 1940 and 1945, in part because poultry, unlike beef, pork, veal and lamb, was not rationed during World War II. The availability of chicken encouraged consumption, as did research and technology developments that allowed the emerging broiler industry to expand rapidly.
In 1950, more than 1.6 million farms spread across the country were growing chickens for American consumers. By 2007, fully 98 percent of those chicken farms were gone, despite the fact that Americans were consuming even more chicken—more than 85 pounds per person per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).4 Over that same period, broiler sales jumped by 8 billion birds, or more than 1,400 percent. These seemingly conflicting statistics result from the shifting of poultry production from traditional farms to an industrialized system of processing plants served by massive growing operations that produce not only more chickens, but bigger chickens at a faster rate.
With the development of these large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), barnyards have virtually disappeared, and many of today’s broiler operations have little land associated with them, other than land for the chicken houses and access roads. A 2009 USDA report noted that one-third of modern broiler operations have no associated cropland. This lack of associated cropland can have a profound impact on pollution and waste management.
 The human-directed evolution are pretty astonishing.


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