Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (35 page)

A new $1.8 million research facility at Michigan State University in East Lansing is designed to answer that question. Animal welfare scientist Janice Siegford, who is conducting experiments in the boxy building on the outskirts of campus, is part of a new generation of researchers who want to use science to improve the treatment of chickens while accepting the reality of consumer and industry economics. Siegford worries that the debate about battery cages is driven by emotion or economics rather than data, so she has begun tracking the behavior of laying hens living in three different housing systems.

Siegford, athletic and wearing close-cropped hair, is preparing to take freshman and sophomore students on a tour of the facility when we meet. The neuroscientist began her career experimenting on the spinal cords of Mongolian gerbils to understand how neurons are generated, work that could provide clues to treating human paralysis. Frustrated with the field's tendency to reduce everything to its component parts rather than consider the whole organism, she switched to animal welfare research. “Helping people with paralysis is pretty cool stuff,” she says. “But I thought if I was going to use animals in my research, then I would like it to benefit them directly.”

When the students arrive, Siegford explains the goals of her research program and challenges them to consider difficult questions. “Our idea is to find out what is good for the chickens so that they have
a better quality of life. As you go through, consider the pros and cons of chicken health, your health, and economics, too—there's a lot to think about.” In an anteroom we don white suits designed to protect the seventy-two hundred birds from illness and then enter the wide main hall that leads to a dozen separate rooms. Four contain aviaries, tiers of cages with an open area of litter on one side. Eight have cages that contain perches, dust bathing mats, and screened-off nest ­boxes—“enriched” cages in poultry parlance. These two systems are the leading alternatives to broiler-shed or battery-cage models.

Siegford guides me into the cloying warmth of an aviary bathed in eerie pink light, with three tiers of cages and an open area on one side of the floor housing several hundred White Leghorn hens. Allowing the birds to roam the floor and tread in dung gives them more freedom and increases the odds that harmful microbes could be transmitted to their eggs. The open area is divided into Astroturf, sawdust, straw, and bare concrete so that researchers can determine which environment appeals the most to the hens and test the microbial load of each flooring material. A student group troops into the room. “Why do some have big bald spots?” asks one. “Chickens are not kind and gentle,” replies Siegford. “They peck at each other and pull feathers out. When a hen lays an egg, her cloaca pushes out and is bright red. In a sea of white chickens, that is startling and attractive and they may peck at that. And some of the spots come from their rubbing against the cage.”

The enriched cage next door gives birds more room for movement than a battery cage, but there is no open floor space where they can gather. Bright-orange curtains close off nest boxes and hens sit on small perches, features absent in battery cages. Another enriched cage includes a greater assortment of perches and nest boxes, as well as small plastic mats designed for dust bathing. Siegford wants to understand what size a nest box must be to assure privacy and what height is optimal for a perch. Getting such small details right is necessary to ensure the birds' comfort and mental health.

Hens are more likely to die in an aviary, fall prey to cannibalism, or suffer from the higher levels of ammonia and dust stirred up by their movement, says Siegford. Gathering eggs is also more difficult
for workers, who must use rakes and slide around on their bellies. The birds in the enriched cages, by contrast, appear to have more bald spots around their necks. “This one's seriously feather pecked,” she notes as she peers into the cage. “Oooh, that's bad.”

The research program is in its early stages, so she can't yet draw firm conclusions, but she's skeptical that the open-floor approach improves overall chicken welfare. “Aviaries let chickens have more freedom,” she says, “but I don't think they always use that freedom wisely.” Siegford worries that animal-rights organizations, states, and industry will shift to aviaries before it is clear that they are an improvement. She believes that enriched cages may be the better choice for practical as well as welfare reasons, since the industry already is used to managing caged birds.

How much space a bird needs to live comfortably remains a matter of dispute between activists and industry, and Siegford hopes her research will provide clear answers. Every single hen in the facility is weighed, tagged, and given a welfare quality score, data that might reveal when overcrowding triggers increased violence and disease. The point at which chicken's social structure, called the pecking order, breaks down is not yet known, although Siegford estimates that the limit is a community of fifty birds.

Stepping back into the hall, she points out a panel regulating water, feed, and air temperature for each room. Her goal is to add a sensor that can alert operators if birds go silent or panic en masse, a feature that could become part of commercial laying operations. Observing a flock's behavior is simpler than attempting to track an individual among thousands, so Siegford and an MSU engineer turned to sensing technology used in the military to track the location and status of soldiers in the field using electronic harnesses. These are too large and expensive to use on chickens, so the pair designed a miniature sensor and went to a pet store and bought a hundred Chihuahua harnesses—“the clerk thought we were crazy”—that could be slipped over a bird. Such a device ultimately could be used to spot depressed appetite or increased pecking among individuals, signaling health or behavioral trouble before they reach epidemic proportions.

More humane environments and better monitoring would benefit layers, but they will not address some of the most disturbing practices in today's industrial agriculture. Layer hatcheries discard all roosters, and there are no U.S. government regulations on how this should be done. No law prevents abuse of the unwanted animals. Laying operations frequently limit food or starve aging hens to speed molting so that they will resume laying more rapidly.

Within a year or two, a typical laying hen is spent. “We selected chickens to lay eggs at the expense of their own bodies,” says Siegford. “You won't see a physically healthy hen at the end of her laying cycle no matter what nirvana you put her in. Her body is driving her to lay eggs.” No matter how many perches, dust-bathing mats, or open space are provided to hens, the genetics of the bird works against its welfare. And once their laying days are over, there are no laws governing their destruction, and the hens have almost no economic value except as fertilizer or pet food.

As we step outside and the students depart, Siegford's faith that science will build a bridge to better chicken welfare wavers. The scale of commercial layer operations boggles her mind. “When you look down the row at a laying house, you can't see to the end. How many birds are there, and how do you keep track of their welfare? What bothers me is that we are so disconnected from these living beings, and our role as caretakers, in the name of efficiency and cheap food.” And chickens, she adds, evoke less interest and empathy than cows or pigs. “They are like background noise. But not if you really look at them. They use the sun to tell time, their social communication is quite complex, and they are one of the few animals besides primates to alter their message to suit their audience.”

The campus of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology on the outskirts of Nairobi is a lush and shady retreat from the noise and traffic of the Kenyan capital. Sheila Ommeh, who is tall even without her black strap-on heels, meets me at the main gate. The molecular biologist is Africa's Henry Wallace, a single-minded
poultry promoter on a mission to give chickens a starring role in the development of her country and continent.

“Chickens may be small, but if they are properly harnessed, they can have a big impact,” she says. “There's great potential to benefit farmers across Africa.” Only one Kenyan chicken in ten is raised on an industrial-scale farm, but indigenous chickens are too expensive for most city dwellers and rural people. A rooster can cost twenty dollars, a large sum in a country where the average annual salary is under a thousand dollars and unemployment runs at 40 percent. Ommeh put together a joint effort with the university, the National Museums, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and the Ministry of Livestock Development to transform the expensive and neglected bird into a source of protein and income for poor Kenyans, a model she hopes to spread across Africa.

A microbiology class with a dozen graduate students is in session in her lab, so Ommeh takes me across the dusty road to an empty chicken house. Previous researchers raised a layer with indigenous genes developed by a French company, but they proved too expensive and require vaccines and special feed unavailable in most rural areas of the country. Ommeh intends to replace those birds with tougher and cheaper local varieties that lack the egg-laying capacities of industrial birds but are better adapted to the realities of Kenyan farming.

“The chickens will have plenty of room to play around in the sunshine,” she says, gesturing toward the field adjacent to the coop. Ommeh grew up in western Kenya, in a village on the slopes of fourteen-­thousand-foot Mount Elgon, and as a young biologist she landed a position in Nairobi's prestigious International Livestock Research Institute, which emphasizes large livestock like cattle. “I came from a community of chickens and my grandmother watched helplessly as her chickens died of disease. She would say to me, ‘You are a scientist but you don't help us!' I realized I would benefit my community more by working on chickens.” Unable to convince the institute to focus on poultry, in 2011 she left her prestigious post at the university and began to build support among academics, development specialists, and politicians.

In the 1970s, Western aid agencies introduced the Rhode Island
Red and other varieties of industrial chickens that quickly died off, but not before mixing with local birds. The resulting hybrids lacked tolerance for the tropical diseases and local flocks were decimated. Ommeh is searching for those few Kenyan birds with enough indigenous genes to survive dry spells and avian illnesses endemic to the country. “Making sure they are disease and drought tolerant is more important than talking about their meat productivity,” she says. “And we have to move fast or it will be too late.”

Ommeh targeted Lamu on the Indian Ocean coast, near the border with Somalia, to seek out the last of the purebred Kenyan chickens. The country's oldest continuously settled city, Lamu is a sleepy backwater that once was a bustling port filled with African, Indian, and Southeast Asian merchants. She discovered a large local multicolored chicken called the Kuchi kept as an ornamental pet and gamecock. She also explored the remote area around Lake Turkana in the northwest, near Ethiopia and South Sudan, where chicken soup and eggs are an important part of the diet of tribespeople who primarily herd cattle. Small but extremely hardy, the white bird thrives in a stark landscape where temperatures regularly soar above 108 degrees.

At the lab, Ommeh holds up her field kit for gathering chicken samples—a Samsung Android phone. “This is better than a laptop—you just need batteries and you are ready to go.” In Lamu and Turkana she uses the phone to input vital information like the coordinates of the sampling site, the bird's laying capacity, and its adaptive traits. She also drips blood samples on chemically treated cards that require no refrigeration and scans their individual bar codes to link the sample with the phone data.

Back in the lab, she analyzes the genetic makeup of the chicken blood to pinpoint the mechanisms behind the birds' tolerance to disease and extreme environmental conditions. The result, Ommeh hopes, will be chickens that are easy to care for, inexpensive, and adaptable to rural Kenya. She smiles, returning the phone to her pocket. “My grandmother would be very happy that my science is doing something practical.”

13.

A Last Cause

How long have humans and nonhumans been carrying on this way?

—Alice Walker,
The Chicken Chronicles

N
guyen Dong Chung's village sits amid the electric-green rice fields of Vietnam's fertile Red River valley. A slight, middle-aged man in a white button-down shirt and dark trousers, Chung is the protector of the Ho chicken. Before the revolutions and wars that rocked his country in the twentieth century, the finest pair of Ho was presented to the king and queen in nearby Hanoi during the Chinese New Year festival. On special occasions, a Ho is still slaughtered, cooked, and presented to the ancestors, and then eaten by the descendants. “My grandfather and his grandfather raised Ho,” he says through a translator. “We are proud of them. We think they are very important.”

Chung, who has maintained his family's profitable business selling Ho chickens, draws customers from around the Hanoi area. He guides me through a warren of alleys to a series of coops where he raises the bird, an ungainly creature with huge feet supporting a large, thin frame with dark feathers and red skin topped with a rose comb. “They are big and beautiful and their meat is tasty,” Chung says. The
eggs go for a pricey three dollars each and a chick for five dollars. At a nearby shop, his Ho gamecocks are for sale at two hundred to three hundred dollars apiece.

The Ho are among the last of the world's ancient chicken varieties. Western heritage breeds and the modern industrial chicken are descendants of the nineteenth-century British and American hen fevers. Village fowl like the Ho, by contrast, date back many centuries and even millennia. Vietnam alone has sixteen distinct chicken breeds that account for three out of every four chickens raised in the country. As industrial broilers and layers proliferate around the world, these village birds are quietly disappearing. That fact worries the Chinese biologist Han Jianlin, who collects genetic data on chickens like the Ho and introduced me to Chung. “The system is changing fast, and the old varieties may vanish with the older generation,” he says as we return to the smog of Hanoi. As they vanish, diverse and useful traits cultivated by local breeders over thousands of chicken generations will be lost.

Like Ommeh, Han wants to preserve traits that might benefit poor farmers around the world. Since 2001, he and his colleagues have amassed nearly thirty thousand samples of village chickens from Angola to the Philippines. A broad-shouldered man with thick hair and perfect English, he has a state-of-the-art biology laboratory in Beijing but spends much of his time in the field, visiting breeders like Chung and monitoring efforts to create birds well suited for a particular climate, ecology, and palate. I accompany him next to the National Institute of Animal Husbandry in a southern suburb of Hanoi, where he checks up on some of his latest experiments. We don rubber boots and white coats at the entrance and walk among rows of long concrete coops with metal roofs that house Vietnam's poultry laboratory. His goal is to create hybrids that are tasty, resistant to local diseases, and more productive than existing varieties. If a new strain seems promising, the chickens are distributed to villagers and farmers around the country.

Han's passion for village chickens took root as he was growing up in China's western province of Gansu in the 1960s, when it was illegal
for an individual to own a chicken and millions perished of starvation under the communist government of Chairman Mao Zedong. When those restrictions were lifted in the late 1970s after Mao's death, Han raised a flock, collected the eggs, hid them from his hungry sister, and periodically sold them at a market to buy books and pencils for school. That led to college, a PhD in biology, and a certainty that poultry offers enormous advantages over larger livestock.

One-third of South Asians and more than half of all sub-Saharan Africans suffer from malnutrition or undernutrition, mostly in rural areas. Dependence on grains like rice can make pregnant women and young children more vulnerable to disease. Chicken meat and eggs offer a high dose of protein as well as vitamins and minerals like lysine, threonine, and other important amino acids that lower the risk of macular degeneration and cataracts. Village chickens can reduce child mortality, improve the health of pregnant mothers, and contribute to public health by eating insects that spread disease. They don't compete with humans for food, as pigs can, and their care requires little infrastructure.

As Han knows from personal experience, the bird and its eggs can help families pay for school fees and supplies otherwise beyond their means. When he discovered that chickens are the world's most studied animal, but that village birds were largely ignored by industry and academic poultry specialists, he set out to find, catalog, and study these forgotten fowl.

The next morning, I join Han and Le Thi Thuy, a senior scientist in animal husbandry at the Hanoi institute, on an expedition to the country's mountainous northwest to visit research stations and perhaps encounter a red jungle fowl in its natural habitat. The remote and rural region bordering Laos and China is renowned for its tasty chicken varieties. The following evening, at a popular restaurant in a town high in the mountains, we sample three kinds of chicken, each prepared as medallions that include skin, bone, fat, gristle, and meat, and served with the cooked comb. One dish is honey-colored, another metallic gray, and the third black. “Which do you prefer?” Han asks as Le digs into the feast. I confess that the darker the meat,
the less palatable I find it. He laughs and explains that the oilier and darker the meat, the more it is prized.

In Vietnam, chicken is not simply a meal. The organs, bones, blood, and feathers as well as the meat of what is known as the Hmong chicken are black, and the bird is famous in north Vietnam for its ability to enhance a person's vitality, liven up a sluggish sex drive, and remedy heart disease. The Tre chicken in the country's south is a favorite gamecock, fierce in the ring. The Tre, bred in the central part of the country, is popular as a dwarf breed.

The country's rapid development and fast-growing population, which tripled in the past fifty years and soon will top 100 million, is changing the ancient relationship between Vietnamese and chickens. The number of birds raised here annually doubled from 1995 to 2010, to 200 million. Local varieties still dominate, but they are losing their market share to industrial chickens as young, urban Vietnamese frequent fast-food outlets like KFC, which recently opened its thousandth restaurant in the country.

After China, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, Vietnam is the world's largest importer of industrial chicken. Even with massive imports, however, the country appears to be eating itself up. Han points out the window of our truck at bright orange stripes that crease the northwest mountains. He says that in order to feed the factory-farmed pigs and chickens that are a growing part of the Vietnamese diet, farmers cut down trees to plant corn on steep slopes, but after a few harvests, the thin soil washes away in the tropical downpours, leaving ugly orange gullies that the forest cannot easily reclaim.

The large and pale-breasted industrial bird is even showing up in rural areas far removed from Hanoi's supermarkets. In one market town near the border with Laos, two plucked industrial chickens lay at the far end of one market vendor's table. Though cheaper than the half-dozen other local breeds she offered, they weren't selling. “No one really likes them,” the vendor confided. “They don't have any flavor.” Yet the bird's very presence marks change, a change that Han sees sweeping other rural areas from Africa to India.

The threat of avian influenza in Southeast Asia may be as much
or more of a threat to the traditional village chicken than KFC. Italians first described the illness in the wake of Chinese chicken imports in the 1870s, but few scientists suspected until recently that deadly viruses could jump from chickens to humans. Recent research suggests that the 1918 pandemic that killed 50 million people and sickened about one-third of the entire human population may have begun in chickens and then moved to pigs before infecting humans. In the late 1990s, a strain named H5N1 afflicting Hong Kong waterfowl jumped species and killed a half-dozen people. All 1.6 million of the city-state's live poultry were destroyed to halt its spread. A half-dozen years later, birds began to die in northern Thailand and southern China. “From the tips of their combs to the claws on their feet, the birds literally
melt
,” one horrified Western scientist reported. The virus again leaped species. Half of the hundred people infected died—a shockingly high rate—and tens of millions of birds across the region were killed to contain the epidemic, with Vietnam particularly hard-hit.

Such threats boost industrial-chicken enterprises at the expense of traditional backyard chickens and live poultry markets. Growing birds in enclosed and isolated facilities that strictly limit their contact with anything on the outside, such as ducks, pigs, and humans, reduces the risk of deadly species-to-species transmission. That fact encourages governments to back large and centralized poultry operations in the name of public health. In 2004, Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra threatened to ban villagers from raising hens and gamecocks, a policy supported by large chicken producers like ­Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand, which employs more than a hundred thousand people and accounts for about 10 percent of ­Thailand's gross domestic product. A massive culling of village chickens infuriated small farmers across the country. Many of them received only small sums for expensive game fowl that were slaughtered. Some researchers suspect that the fast-growing industrial-­poultry business has also played a role in the crisis, since the virus spread at the same time that the industry began to expand.

In 2013, a new strain of the H7N9 virus killed more than one
in three of the 135 people infected in China. Most of those victims had contact with live poultry, so the infections likely came directly from chickens. But scientists discovered that the strain can rapidly mutate, and fear that it could find a way to pass between humans. Some researchers argue that the best solution is to close China's live-­poultry markets. This radical approach worked in Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Huzhou, where the spread of infection stopped as a result, according to a study in the medical journal
The Lancet.
Other researchers say that disinfecting poultry markets once a week could reduce the spread of the virus without undoing a traditional part of the Chinese social fabric. The combination of economics and ­public-health concerns threaten the local birds and markets that have been part of Southeast Asian village life for millennia.

Han sees the march of the industrial chicken as unfortunate but unstoppable. He recently returned to his home village in western China and was shocked to find no chickens or pigs, since local families now buy their meat from a supermarket. He is even doubtful that the Ho cultivated by Chung outside Hanoi will remain economically viable as the price for imported chickens drops and tastes change. Some biologists fear that humanity's dependence on a few breeds of chickens exposes a critical part our food supply to disaster should an epidemic wipe out a large percentage of, say, the Rhode Island Red or the White Leghorn.

Han is skeptical of such a doomsday scenario. Although he is among the strongest advocates for preserving vanishing village varieties, he says that the industrial bird retains a high degree of genetic diversity that makes such a calamity unlikely. Like William Beebe, he has faith in the chicken's astonishing ability to adapt to the needs of humans, if not in the humans' ability to make wise choices.

Chickens arrived on the human scene as humans began to grow and eat grain. But most grains like corn lack important nutrients, particularly amino acids such as lysine and threonine. Chicken meat and eggs are rich in these essential amino acids. “This feature of chicken
metabolism—the ability of the hen to lay down in her egg amino acids that man cannot synthesize—has played an important role in the evolution of both species,” two academics write. “The presence of only the occasional egg in the diet could well change a marginal meal into one that is nutritionally satisfactory.”

If humans continue to eat meat in the twenty-first century, then industrial chicken is a better option than pork or beef. Chickens require less land, water, and energy inputs than pigs or cows. Less than two pounds of feed produces a pound of meat, a fraction of what other animals require. Only farmed salmon can beat that ratio. Meat production accounts for nearly 20 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere and more than 80 percent of all the greenhouse gases produced by agriculture. Pound for pound, chicken releases only one-tenth the greenhouse gases of red meat such as hamburger.

The British economist Thomas Malthus warned two centuries ago that population growth would overwhelm our ability to produce food. He could never have foreseen the introduction of exotic Asian fowl, advances in genetics, and the rise of cheap energy and large corporations that transformed the scrawny bird of his day into a mass-produced and inexpensive commodity. A billion chickens weighing more than 12 million tons cross national boundaries each year. Dutch chickens sizzle on the silver platters of Kuwaiti princes, Angolan tribespeople barter in local markets for Arkansas birds, and Brazilian fowl are for sale in Beijing superstores. Global poultry exports expanded more than a quarter between 2008 and 2013, with sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East accounting for most of that increase. Ghana imported more than two hundred thousand tons of frozen chicken in 2012, three times what it bought a decade before.