the-circles-of-life:Gallus gallusRed Junglefowl Why did the chicken cro—nevermind, the joke&
the-circles-of-life: Gallus gallusRed Junglefowl Why did the chicken cro—nevermind, the joke’s overused. But to me, it shows that chickens have been a big part of our life. In fact, as I’m writing this, there’s a viral study stating that chicken bones in the landfills will be our legacy in the fossil record. There are about 21 billion chickens living today, about three for each person. We slaughter 60 billion of them yearly, more than half the number of all humans that have ever lived. I too, have raised and eaten many of them in my life. I spent hundreds of hours playing Harvest Moon in the 90s, fooling around with the hens. I started studying animal anatomy by staring at chicken photos on the internet. It’s impossible to ignore their contribution to our history—beyond MY history. The Chinese Zodiac features a rooster in their roster. The Europeans feared the mythical cockatrice. Pope Gregory I picked the rooster as an emblem for Christianity. They have fed countless people from the Ancient Romans to minimum wage millennials in the form of cheap nuggets. And what do they get in return? They don’t get the glory of dogs or war horses. The word “chicken” refers to a coward, and people say feathered dinosaurs are no longer scary now that they look like chickens. I bet those people have never seen how brutal cockfights are. To me, domestic chickens reflect our ever-evolving relationship with nature and what we value in it. Wherever humans went, we took chickens with us and bred them to fit our many desires. Today, a big chunk of the world breeds broilers for their eggs and flesh. But the all-black Cemani of Java is bred for their mystical appearance. In Japan, the Onagadori is considered a National Natural Treasure, thanks to it’s long, trailing phoenix-like tail. As the final entry in this series, the chicken sums up why I did this project in the first place. We take the birds for granted. But if we trace back from their beginning as the wild Red Junglefowl in Asia, we start to unravel countless stories. These stories not only tell how creatures live and evolve, but also how their history is intertwined with ours. These stories, in the end, are also about us. — Franz Anthony is a graphic designer and illustrator. For someone who uses a chicken avatar and draws fish for a living, he tweets a lot about invertebrates. My main blog · Twitter · Instagram · Behance · Studio 252MYA · Ko-fi · Patreon -- source link