I’m a birder and until quite recently I ate birds, nearly all of them chickens. Chickens are domesticated Junglefowl, of which there are four species in the wild: Red, Green, Grey and Sri Lanka. The domestication of the chicken first took place in India (although some say it was China, or maybe it was Thailand) in roughly the 6th Century BC. Whichever, today’s domesticated chicken is a descendant of the Red Junglefowl (gallus gallus), a bird that is still relatively common in the wild in South, South East and East Asia.
Junglefowl are magnificent creatures. One of the most spectacular birds I have seen in the wild was the Green Junglefowl. There are a good number on Komodo Island, cohabiting with the eponymous Dragon and, to my eyes, they are just as noteworthy.
It is estimated that we kill about 65 billion chickens each year for human consumption. Body counts like that make the eyes glaze over. Chickens are now the cheapest form of meat available to most urban consumers. But this was not always the case. When I was growing up in the 1950s in England, neighbours would bring us a fresh-killed chicken from their backyard hen house every Christmas. My mother would pluck and draw it in the kitchen sink. The Christmas chicken was a treat, a luxury. Now, chicken meat is a fast-food staple. Wrapped in plastic, or re-constituted into bite size chunks, it takes up shelf after shelf in the supermarket.
Humans have produced a multitude of regional variations and decorative varieties through cross-breeding of domesticated chickens. In the Philippines and elsewhere, they are bred to fight. The ones we eat, produced on an industrial scale, are modified in such a way as to produce much more meat, much more quickly. Most of this form of chicken farming involves a great deal of cruelty and suffering. And the result is a grotesque creature, all breast, tottering on short legs. They are packed into cages in huge sheds, unable to do most of the things that Junglefowl excel at. The farmers administer various chemical substances to produce the kind of meat we like.
No other bird has quite reached the world-wide popularity of the chicken for human consumption, although in China, ducks are not far behind. Many farmers raise a flock of ducks and geese in their rice paddy or in the irrigation ditches. It seems they lead a pretty good life.
Turkeys are also popular in some countries. Wild Turkey were hunted intensively in North America, to the point of being dangerously close to being wiped out, but they have more recently been closely protected and there are now some 3.5 million of them in the wild.
Mexicans (or their ancestors) first domesticated Turkeys in around 800 BC. In England, Norfolk is the home of most turkey farms, because the Duke of Orford Horatio Walpole, with estates in Norfolk, was the grandee that first imported them for decorating his lawns and for good eating. In the USA, Minnesota is the top Turkey meat producer. They are reared in huge ‘grower houses’ (a.k.a. sheds). Each Thanksgiving, about 50 million are slaughtered.
Aside from chickens and turkeys, we eat other members of the Phasianidae family: Pheasants, Grouse, Ptarmigan, Quail and Partridge. I once saw, in an old Victorian cookbook, a recipe for Capercaillie (a kind of super-charged Grouse), which occurs wild in parts of Scotland. They are still hunted in parts of Eastern Europe. Common Pheasant and Red Grouse, in particular, are ‘game birds’ in the UK, meaning they are shot for recreation, after which some of them may be eaten.
Red Grouse (these days, taxonomic authorities call them Willow Ptarmigan) are native to the British Isles, but Common Pheasants are introduced. The North American and other subspecies of Willow Ptarmigan live in the far north and turn white in winter. But the British subspecies lagopus lagopus scotia remains brown (not red) all the year round.
Game keepers charged with looking after the Grouse on Highlands estates in Scotland have been regularly accused of shooting legally protected raptors, such as Hen Harriers and Golden Eagles, which sometimes prey on young birds. Currently, there is a strong move to license grouse estates to provide an effective sanction against the repeat offenders. The owners and their rich clients are up in arms.
There are thirty subspecies of Common Pheasant, distributed from Central Asia east to China. Roaming wild in their native Kazakhstan or Sichuan, they are far from being mundane or unremarkable. But in the UK, they are viewed as mere shotgun fodder. They are captive-bred in their millions and then released onto landed estates reserved for shooting, before being shot at by toffs and bankers in the hunting season. Many escape this fate and wander off into the surrounding countryside, raiding suburban garden bird-feeders and causing unknown harm to the native wildlife. They litter the roads with their corpses.
In the 19th Century in North America and Europe, before hunting of birds was regulated, we ate just about anything palatable that could be readily and legally snared or shot (as in ‘Four-and-twenty Blackbirds, baked in a pie’). In Britain, if the hunt was not legal and involved game birds the hunter might have ended up in Australia as a transported convict. On one of Australia’s convict settlements, tiny Norfolk Island, the convicts carried on their eating habits and drove the endemic Ground Dove almost to extinction (settlers and other introduced predators finished them off not long after).
In a restaurant some years ago in a rural province of Vietnam I was offered Black Drongos, which are caught in nets in the rice paddies during migration season. At least, I think they were Black Drongos: the chef picked them out from my bird book when I asked what they were. I had seen migrating Drongos in large numbers in the surrounding countryside.
Such slaughter of small wild animals for food is not, of course, confined to birds. The country restaurant where the Drongos were served also showed off shelves of jars which, upon close inspection, contained a grotesque collection of pickled wildlife of all kinds.
In Eastern China, I have walked through paddocks littered with dead and dying Wagtails, Buntings and many other migrating species, attracted by playback of their songs and killed with poisoned bait. Migrating Yellow-breasted Buntings (also known in China as ‘Rice Birds’) have been so effectively harvested in mist nets in the rice fields each year that they are now listed as critically endangered.
And it is not just in Asia that small birds are still considered a delicacy. In many parts of Europe, they are a treasured part of the local cuisine . A well-known case is the Ortolan, a delicacy of the French culinary arts. Ortolan buntings are trapped on migration, kept in darkened cages and fed millet until they double their weight (they react to the dark by gorging themselves). They are then drowned in Armagnac and left to marinate, before being cooked. You are supposed to cover your head with a napkin while eating them whole, in one gulp.
Until not so long ago, I saw little to be concerned about in both admiring all these birds in the wild and also eating them. I told myself that eating birds and other creatures was just part of the natural order of things. Just as one of our neighbours in my youth brought us our Christmas chicken, another sometimes left us a few Pheasants on the porch, shot somewhere in the nearby countryside (possibly poached). Likewise, after a good day’s shooting, hares or rabbits would occasionally feature at the dinner table – we spat out the tiny balls of lead shot and counted them up on the side of the plate at the end of the meal. And yes, I did try those Drongos – they were OK (but no, I haven’t eaten Ortolans).
In popular opinion, there seems to be somewhat less urgency and alarm over hunting and trapping of wild birds than in the case of wild mammal species such as Tigers and Pangolins (which are highly valued for dubious medicinal purposes). Here in Australia, it was only as recently as 1986 that the last finch trappers in the north of Western Australia were forced to close their businesses down. Wild Australian finches, such as the Gouldian Finch and Pictorella Mannikin, were much sought after as cage birds.
Recently, we have begun to worry more and more about the scale of hunting of wild animals not just because iconic wildlife is disappearing at a rapid rate, but also because it leads to the transmission of zoonotic diseases to the human population. Conspiracy theories aside, this seems to have been the root of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And hunting of birds all over the world is increasingly recognised as a proximate cause of population crashes and possible extinctions of rare species. Many of these birds are captured for the cage-bird trade, not killed, but the effect is the same: decimation of the wild populations. The problem has become chronic in parts of South-east Asia.
So, here is another issue: how much longer can we go on shooting and eating (or caging) wild creatures before they are headed for extinction? In fact, whether or not shooting or snaring of birds causes such damage is a matter for investigation. At a certain level, hunting for food or the cage bird trade may be sustainable because of ‘spare capacity’ in the breeding population. Less competition for scarce resources as a result of human consumption means greater breeding success for the remaining birds – and so on year after year, with due moderation shown by the hunters. In Western Australia, the trapping of finches had been closely regulated for over half a century with sustainability in mind.
Indeed, it was not so much shooting nor snaring that put me off eating birds, it was more the result of what I learnt about industrial farming. Industrial growing and slaughter of livestock for human consumption is not only cruel in varying degrees, it also causes pollution and damages nature. Forests are mown down to make way for cattle and huge pig factories poison the air and the water. If you prefer to be more human-centred about things, the dosing up of farm animals (particularly chickens) with antibiotics has been a cause of the declining effectiveness of such medicines, as the bugs encounter them more often and evolve their defences.
To begin with, I was selective, I bought ‘organic’ and ‘free-range’ chickens. But when it comes to slapping on a feel-good label there is many a semantic slip between farm and table. Now, a steak or a chicken breast on the supermarket shelf is to me first and foremost a reminder of all the harms that we are responsible for in this era of industrial agriculture. In the end, it turned out to be no great sacrifice to give up on buying meat altogether (it helps, I have to say, that I do like beans).
Repulsion and shame over the killing of so many animals are among the reasons I changed my diet. And in the case of farmed animals, the mistreatment when alive, as well as the killing, is disconcerting, to say the least. I take animal welfare seriously – the case for treating all sentient beings as having moral worth, instead of treating non-human beings as having an intrinsically lesser status, is compelling. They suffer as we do and some of them are as emotionally complex and intelligent, in one respect or another, as some of us. And the sheer quantity of suffering among those billions of chickens is mind-boggling.
But the animal welfare case is not the whole story. I am just as concerned, if not more so, with the direct and indirect effects of the mass consumption of meat on biodiversity and the extinction crisis. If anything, my greater concern is for saving species than for saving every one of their individual members. In Australia, rabbits have a bad name and are not generally on the menu, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if more Australians liked to eat them, given their status as an invasive pest in the wild. But then, it would probably be cheaper to farm them, and they’d end up, like the chickens, in those dreadful sheds.
The clincher in the case for eating less meat of the kind most humans prefer is global warming. With the evidence mounting of the impact of industrial animal farming on the accumulation of greenhouse gases (for example, by the clearing of forests for pasture and the emission of methane gases from cattle), my even greater concern now is for the impact on the future of all life on the planet.
So, a decision whether or not to eat chicken, beef, pork, Ortolan or Pangolin is not just a matter of taste and preference, nor only a matter of moral judgement on animal welfare grounds. It is most importantly a matter of public policy and the public good. I’m not going to preach the animal welfare case, this is a private matter for everyone’s conscience. But I think I am on stronger ground trying to convince you that slowing biodiversity loss and preventing global warming depend in no small part on all of us agreeing to eat less meat, both as individuals and collectively.
Sources
On chicken farming, see Leah Garcés, Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry, London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019
On the ethics of animal welfare, see Lori Gruen, The Moral Status of Animals, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017)
On the cage-bird trade in Indonesia, see Eaton, J. A. et al., ‘Trade-driven extinctions and near-extinctions of avian taxa in Sundaic Indonesia’, Forktail, 31, 2015, pp. 1-12.
On finch trapping, see Kevin Coate, Lance Merritt, Finch Trapping in the Kimberley, Carlisle, W.A.: Hesperian Press, 2015