Bald birds better?

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33963, 2 October 1975, Page 12

Bald birds better?

As in many other, fields. science has greatly helped the development of the poultry industry with new methods of breeding, feeding and husbandry. But the success of its latest development — the featherless chicken — remains to be seen.

The featherless chicken was discovered in 1957 by Ursula Abbott, of the University of California. Thanks to a genetic quirk, one breed of chickens she raised turned out to have virtually no plummage at all, just traces of feathers amounting to no more than one per cent of the normal bird’s.

This discovery interested agricultural scientists because their concern is to turn every ounce of feed given to a chicken into meat.

Food consumed producing pl umage which nobody

but the chicken wants is food wasted. So the featherless chicken, seen simply as a foodconverting machine, might have a higher “efficiency” than a conventional bird.

Studies by Max Rubin and Daniel Eigbee at the University of Maryland have now found that featherless chickens may have advantages over their feathered counterparts. However, there is a problem. Bald chickens get cold and a cold chicken is either inefficient at putting on weight, or it is dead, neither of which chicken farmers welcome.

In normal conditions, the featherless birds have to be kept warm, which means turning up the heating in the hen-house. Even in a well-heated house, the bald birds consume more energy keeping themselves warm than a conventional bird would.

The question was whether the gain achieved by not having feathers was exceeded by the costs of providing extra heating. Rubin and Bigbee appear to have satisfied themselves that it is, and point out that one-quarter of the protein supplied to a normal chicken goes in making feathers.