Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I mean, what do you expect to happen when you put a bunch of animals in a social and physical environment they are not well-adapted to? It's humans who are the bullies.

View on HN

I can't imagine that modern chickens aren't well adapted to coop life. We've been raising them that way for quite a few millenia now. And look how, for example, dogs have evolved from wolves in the same time frame. At any rate, my mother raises chickens and tried to raise them free range (with full access to 3 or 4 acres) for a while, but she would lose them constantly to coyotes. I think that nowadays, chickens are ill-adapted for the wild.

Dog domestication is possibly at 40kya or so, so in that case much different than the rest of domestication events.

I assume chickens don't live as long as dogs though, right? If that's the case, presumably chickens go through a larger number of generations per unit of time

Chickens don't have natural selection. They are bed for fatness.

Neither did dogs. Suffice to say Wolves don't become Chihuahuas in 40k years without some very artificial selection.

Pretty remarkable how short a period can create some monstrously different creatures, even if they are still technically sexually compatible - not that I think a wolfhuahua would be a good idea!

It depends on the confinement, the overcrowding of industrial production may be unadaptable. There are still enough instincts programmed that unfamiliar males would rather avoid each other.

I do not beleive that industrial breeding is selecting for anything that makes such prison life tolerable. Birds in production generally aren't reproducing, so nothing in the henhouse is affecting evolution.

That’s preposterous. There’s no way chickens with the best adaptation are the ones being bread; they’re in cages. Selective breeding could’ve easily developed a selection bias of large chickens that are obscenely aggressive and fight their confines.

Large chickens have certainly been bred for but this is part of the reason modern domesticated chickens are ill suited for wild life: they are too fat and too slow besides being flightless. Hens in particular have no natural defenses against predators.

I can't believe this even needs mentioning, but the life of a factory-farmed chicken today is entirely different from the life of a chicken even a hundred years ago, never mind a thousand. A coop of a dozen chickens at most definitely does not have similar behavioral problems as a vast hall housing a hundred thousand individuals.

Adapted? No.

But modified? Yes. They trim their beaks and claws.

Edit: See https://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/poultry/feed-health/tri...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com