CHICKENS CAME FIRST

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33095, 9 December 1972, Page 12

CHICKENS CAME FIRST

(By

DAVID GUNSTON)

yards, gardens, farms and battery-factories the world over?

From Kashmir, right across India to what is now called Vietnam, the lively red jungle fowl, true ancestor of our modem chickens, lives wild to this day, scratching and pecking on the forest floor, chiefly for insects and seeds, and roosting in the trees at night. In fact, the old-fashioned, multi-coloured farm cockerel is merely a slightly bigger version of the wild bird still numerous in these haunts today. But just how these rather nervy and shy birds first came to the notice of man is not certain, but come they did, and things have never been quite the same since. Most probably primeval jungle fowls met primitive New Stone Age men, probably in the Indus Valley in North-West India when these early humans were first try-, ing to grow things. Tiny croppatches of grain adjoining the forests doubtless provided some of the more adventurous bird with easy food. The humans slaughtered the robbers and found them good to eat, or perhaps chased them back into the jungle where their large clutches of big eggs were soon discovered. Then, some Stone Age farmer with a lot more foresight than his fellows, saw it might be worth penning a few of these fowl on his own territory, eating first the eggs they laid, and eventually them. All we know for certain is that as early as 2000 years before Christ, the Indus Valley people had completely domesticated the red jungle fowl. Everything about the chicken caught man’s fancy. Its eggs, large and flavoursome, were laid in abundance, so it became a symbol of fertility. The cocks indulged in fine showy wooing, bold mating and a disposition for ruling a big roost of submissive hens, so the bird became one of the very first sex symbols. Furthermore, the self-same cocks were nature’s own alarmclocks, whose clarion call got many a medieval peasant from his bed to start work in the fields.

As the old saw has it: which came fii’st, chicken or egg? But how exactly did the taken - for - granted' chicken come into our

lives? How did the gaudy and excitable jungle fowl of India become the familiar, friendly, squawking and clucking food-producer of millions of back-