Guest blog Hans Krudde: What is a chicken?

Everyone knows chickens, but what do we really know about the most commonly kept bird species in the world? A chicken is a bird, and more specifically a ground bird. This means that chickens spend most of the day scratching around, foraging, taking dust baths, and the eggs are also laid on the ground, in a sheltered spot. However, by evening, they seek a higher place to safely spend the night, as chickens are prey animals. To get into the trees, chickens must be able to fly. Like all other birds, chickens have wings, hollow bones, and air sacs; however, compared to other birds, chickens are not high flyers.

Homebound

The limited flying ability applies to all pheasants, including chickens. Chickens are descended from wild junglefowl from Asia and were the first pheasants to be domesticated, which occurred around 3000 BC. The wild junglefowl, the most well-known being the Bankiva fowl, still live in the wild in Asia and were relatively easy to tame, partly because chickens are quite homebound. Once accustomed to their new, limited living conditions, they prefer to stay 'close by'. Moreover, the first domesticated chickens were not kept for their eggs but for their meat and... people enjoyed cockfighting!

The Wide World

From Asia, domesticated chickens spread across the globe, adapting to local conditions such as climate and food supply. This resulted in a huge variety of appearances, and some breeds now seem only distantly related to the ancestral chicken. Around the beginning of the Common Era, incubators heated by composting horse manure were even used to produce more chicks. Humans began to play an increasingly significant role in the breeding and development of chickens, which has contributed to the vast diversity of breeds we know today.

Noble Chickens

In Western Europe, chickens, brought by trade voyages and crusades, particularly ended up with the nobility and were considered a luxury product. It was not until the nineteenth century that more and more chickens found their way to farms, making eggs and meat accessible to the 'ordinary' population.

Something for Everyone

By selecting specific traits, driven by both aesthetic and commercial motives, chickens with different comb shapes, feather types, colors, sizes, excellent layers, or meat producers emerged. No matter how different the over 250 chicken breeds are, they still exhibit many behaviors of the original ancestral chickens from Asia.

Natural Behavior

For everyone who keeps chickens or is considering keeping chickens, it is very important to take these natural behaviors of chickens seriously. If you understand how crucial the ability to perform natural behavior is for a chicken's well-being, you will quickly grasp what the housing or feeding of our domestic chickens should look like. In the upcoming blogs, we will therefore pay a lot of attention to the natural behavior of chickens and the provisions we make to give even 'captive' birds a chicken-worthy life. Since I would like to make you a bit chicken-minded, many fun and interesting blogs will follow! Topics such as the evolution of a chicken, the housing of a chicken, the natural habitat, and much more.