|
The first chickens were bred for fighting and show, not for
chicken meat or eggs.
And it happened in South-East Asia,
perhaps long before Western 'first farmers' got going at
all.
 
Scenes from my local
weekly
chickenfight
"Neither the
domesticated chicken nor its eggs appear to be eaten during early
times on either side of the Pacific. One of the earliest breeds of
chicken was the fighting cock. From it, special breeds of
long-crowing cocks were developed in
Asia".
Quests of the Dragon and Bird Clan
I think that's pushing it a
bit. No Philippine chickens are selected for sentry duty or anything
else but fighting. The very word for a cockcrow in my local language
is Tug-tug-a'o, and that's about
all they can manage. Chaucer's 'Chanticleer' would have beaten them
flat.
"....Although
chickens are strongly associated with egg production in European and
neo-European cultures, elsewhere they have very different
associations...Both Aristotle and Pliny referred to distinct
fighting and meat breeds at the beginning of the Christian era
(Wood-Gush 1959)"
  "In much of Southeast and East Asia they have been bred both
both for fighting and decoration. In Japan for example, there is
little evidence for the exploitation of chickens as food until the
nineteenth century"
K.C.
Macdonald & R.M.Blench - The Cambridge World History of Food
(Cambridge University Press -
2000) |
| Chicken Origins |
|
 Charles Darwin, observing the Red Jungle Fowl of
southeast Asia, identified it as the progenitor of the modern
farmyard chicken. And, as so often, he was dead
right.
"The progenitor of the common fowl is generally
conceded to be the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus ferrugineus or
bankiva), though there are three other wild species, all
oriental. This species is a native of India, a part of China, the
adjacent islands and the Philippines. Its habits are diversified,
for we are told it may "be found in lofty forests and in the dense
thickets, as well as in bamboo jungles, and when cultivated land is
near its haunts, it may be seen in the fields, after the crops are
cut, in straggling parties of from ten to twenty.
This wild species closely resembles the breed
of poultry fanciers called the "Black-breasted Game," but the crow
of the wild cock is not as loud or prolonged as that of the tame
one." Birds and Nature: The Domestic Fowl (October
1900)
"The chicken (Gallus gallus or Gallus
domesticus) is generally considered to have evolved from the jungle
fowl...which ranges throughout the area between eastern India and
Java....Debates regarding the origin and spread of the domestic
chicken focus both on its genetic basis and the "hearth area" of its
initial domestication...archaeological evidence [shows] domestic
chickens to be present at China's Yangshao and Peiligan Neolithic
sites, which dated from circa 8000 to 6000 years ago. As a
consequence, because wild forms of Gallus are entirely absent in
China, and as the climate would have been inimical to them in the
early Holocene, it seems likely that chickens were domesticated
elsewhere at an even earlier date. In the absence of evidence from
India, Southeast Asia (i.e. Thailand) has been put forward as a
likely hearth area...(That) seems to square nicely with some recent
research on the genetic origins of chickens... A.
Fumihito and
colleagues (1994) have shown convincingly that all modern chicken
genes can be derived from the subspecies of Gallus found in
northeast Thailand*"
K.C. Macdonald
& R.M.Blench - The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge
University Press - 2000)
*I question that
one, too - Mr Fumihoto et al tested only 100+ chicken and wildfowl
specimens - within South East Asia there are very many local
subspecies.
|
A fine cockerel in
General Luna, Siargao
Island
|
|
Hens
are more difficult to find - they
scrabble
everywhere, and are very
nervous
|
"In China, the legendary
emperor Fu Hsi is said to have founded the phoenix clan of the Dong
Yi people of Shandong. Chinese legend also states that Fu Hsi
introduced the art of chicken raising and chicken egg-laying.
According to research by Akshino Fumihito, the chicken was
domesticated in Southeast Asia from the red jungle fowl. Fumihito,
by the way, is the brother of crown prince Naruhito of Japan. In
Shinto, the national religion of that country, the chicken is
considered sacred to the sun goddess Amaterasu, the ancestress of
the imperial family".
Source: Quests of the Dragon and Bird
Clan
|
Chicken in the Philippines |
|
|
 About the only noticeable
difference between the wild Red Junglefowl on the left and the
GL chicken on the right is that one has a string around his
leg.
|
|
There are plenty of wild Red
Junglefowl in the Philippines, though none at all in next-door
Borneo. Why that should be so is a total mystery.
"The mere fact that the Philippine population
can be shown to differ from mainland Gallus g. gallus is not
in itself sufficient to establish it as an indigenous race. It
might be suggested that the introduced birds originated from a
subspecifically differentiated population somewhere on the
mainland, not described in the literature. If the junglefowl
were introduced, it was presumably by peoples of Malaysian
stock, who invaded the archipelago at a time when it was
populated by peoples of Negrito type. Harold C. Conklin of
Columbia University informs me (letter of 14 November 1961)
that the "Southern Mongoloids" apparently began to displace
the Negritos about three thousand years ago. It is conceivable
that the junglefowl might have spread through the entire
archipelago and visibly differentiated in three thousand
years, but it seems unlikely. Chickens, whether kept for eggs,
meat, or fighting, represent wealth to their owners; it seems
improbable that enough "escapes" would take place from a
human-kept population to permit the archipelago to be so
widely inhabited by jungle- fowl, even in areas with little or
no human population....Mr. Tom Harrisson, Curator of the
Sarawak Museum, informs me (letter of 23 December 1961) that
he feels that the absence from Borneo of the junglefowl is
actually circumstantial evidence for the natural colonization
of the Philippines, as he cannot believe that man would have
introduced the species to the Philippines and not to Borneo.
The domestic fowl was, indeed, brought to Borneo in ancient
times, as shown by prehistoric paintings of cockfighting on
the walls of Niah Cave (Harrisson, in litt), but there are no
wild junglefowl in Borneo--another piece of evidence against a
domestic origin for the wild Philippine
population."
The Red Junglefowl of the Philippines--Native or
Introduced? - KENNETH C. PARKES Vol. 79, No. 3,
July-September, 1962
Is it
just possible that our local 'native' chickens descended
directly from our local Filipino junglefowl? Yes, of course it
is. | |
|
Cockfight
|
|
In the Philippines, as in all of
South East Asia (and much of the rest of the world), chickens are
still selected first for their fighting abilities, not for their
meat or eggs, and men devote almost more time and expense to them
than they do to their families.
|
First your cock has to be
fed:
 Special shops and special foods
have been developed for fighting cocks, and they are available
in every village. A 1kg pack of cock food costs about P36
(US$0.70) and lasts 3 days per cock. But this may be one of
the very few cash-money expenses for the family, and extra
cash is scarce. Plus, if you have a favoured cock, you
must buy diet supplements, and these, like human diet
supplements, are mostly rubbish, but very expensive. A cock
owner would not even consider buying vitamin pills for his
family, but will shell out for his favourite pet.
If I was a feminist, I would bitch about this. But I'm
not. |
|
Then you train your cock:
Pasikad - Hold it by the tail, wave
it from side to side, and exercise its legs - every
morning.
Tambang - Keep it on a perch, not
quite stable, so it will exercise its wings.
Every so often, match it
(safely) with the cock of a friend, and make sure it's
aggressive.
You'll probably feed it with some patent
medicine, like Thunderbird, before
it's due to fight. |
|
Then you take your cock along to a fight - there
is a cockpit in every village
A committee of experts will determine if
it has the right kind of aggressive behaviour, and onlookers
will start placing bets. You will have to bet money, too, on
your cock, and this determines its place in the ring, or even
if it gets there at all. 20% of your winnings will go to the
cockpit owner. Inilog (the
noble) is the favourite, with the most money placed, and Biya (the low) is the underdog.
But this depends only on bets placed so far; not on
ability.
Now you are a largador, a cock-owner about to go
into the limelight.
You choose a buyang; an attached spur 2-3" long,
that you carefully bind with bayna, a special cockfighting
ribbon, and perhaps tie in a likit, a lucky piece of wood. Then
you wrap the binding in electrical tape to ensure no snags.
Sometimes you even inject your cock with a secret drug to make
it more potent and aggressive for the moment. It's obtainable
at your local pharmacy. But then, so are
steroids.
  
Then, into
the cockpit, and the two largadors show their birds. And
all hell breaks loose. Betting starts. people shout and
gesture:"'Log! 'Log! 'Log!!" and just a few "Biya!"
 
Bets are placed mostly by hand
signals
You introduce
your cock to his, and you carefully protect it while he makes
his cock peck yours in certain parts (usually the neck and
thighs)
Then you retire to the sidelines, and a friend
brings along another 'dummy' cock to agitate yours a bit  more.
Meanwhile the masador is trying to up the bets, to
meet the offered prize money, and accepts screwed up bundles
of notes thrown into the ring. Outside the ring, private bets
are going ahead full steam.
The coimador (referee) potters about,
making sure everything is about
OK.
|
|
Then the fight begins
  A face-off, an attack and a flurry or two -
one chicken's down.
If one (or both) chickens run away,
everyone boos.
The
coimador picks up both of
them, and dramatically presents them to each other, holding
them by their tails. If they both still show aggression,
they're put down to face each other again....and
again....until one gives up, or is obviously dead. Then the
coimador declares a
winner.
The whole performance has probably taken
up 3 minutes.
 
One chicken is the
loser.
And everyone collects their
winnings
|
| There are a couple of idiosyncrasies in Filipino Chickenfights
Binibaje - are
homosexual (or perhaps transsexual roosters) - very rare, but
they also fight. - (I once wrote a short story 'Hipong &
The Cockfight' - wholly imaginary, where Hipong substituted a
twin poof 'ringer' for a fighting cock, and absconded with the
betting money before 'Oscar' flounced around and declined to
play the game). My premise was wholly wrong - whether bayut (male) or tomboy (female) the binibaje fight like the
others.
Wildfowl - In the Agusan Marsh, perhaps the
last remaining 'wilderness' on the 'mainland' of Mindanao,
people trap the manok i
hayas, the wild junglefowl, to cross-breed with
their pet chickens. The wild ones already have a very
developed spur and a primeval
wildness. |
| We, 'superior' Europeans should remember that
we only banned cockfights, and replaced them by 'poultry
fanciers' about 200 years ago, and then only because the
governments couldn't collect the taxes, not because we felt
sorry for the chickens.
Charles Darwin was a 'poultry fancier' and based a lot
of his theory of natural selection on what he saw for himself
about chickens.
We still call that cramped, busy place in an aeroplane
the cockpit. | |
| How Did the Chicken Cross the World? |
|
 "Nanzhuangtou
(in Xushui, Hebei) bottom level 6 (about 9500ya) had
19 bones of 3 possible domestic chickens, smaller than
modern chicken. Sex traits show almost all are cock bone
reflecting conscious choice, as hens were used for egg
production and cocks for food, but cocks may have been
used in religious rites".
Prof.
REN Shinan
(Kaogu
- Archaeology
1996:37-49. Transl. by Wing Kam Cheung; ed. by
B.Gordon
I
have added the italics for hens eggs - I don't believe they
even thought about it.
But
maybe those ancient Chinese were just breeding cocks for
fighting. |
"Chickens
were taken to Oceania by the Austronesian ancestral
Polynesians, starting about 5000 years
ago.
Fleets from the Marquesas Islands (finally)
arrived in Hawai`i from 1000BC -700 AD. The Polynesians
brought pigs and chickens, elephant's ear, shampoo ginger,
gourd, taro, Alexandrian laurel, ti, sugar cane, candlenut,
banana, portia tree, coconut, Indian mulberry, bamboo,
mountain apple, turmeric, Polynesian arrowroot, sweet potato,
yam and breadfruit".
A Brief Overview of
the Political, Cultural and Agricultural Interventions that
have Created the Hawai`i we know Today.
|
Chickens reached Pakistan's
Indus valley (Harappan) civilisation by 4500ya, and Eastern
Europe and Iran at about the same time (Rumania, Turkey, and
Greece), by about 4500ya in the Early Bronze
Age.
And there they seem to have
stopped.
The rest of Europe has no chickens
dated earlier than about 2500ya, brought through Spain by the
Phoenicians.
The earliest finds in the Levant are
from Tell Sweyhat in Northern Syria, about 4-4500ya, but
again, they didn't become common further south until much
later. There
is evidence that chickens were known in Sumer in the 2nd
millenium BC (3500ya) and the Sumero-Babylonian word for
the cock was "the king bird".
|
This gentle view of a cockfight was painted by a 19th
century academician who probably never saw a real one. (And
perhaps he idealized the last female belly he saw,
too). |
In ancient
Egypt, they were kept as exotic pets and gamecocks; a painting
in Tutankhamen's tomb (about 3100ya), shows a cock (but maybe
this was a guinea fowl). It wasn't until after 650BC that they
became common and economically important. They got through to
Sub-Saharan Africa only during the 1st millenium
AD.
"The earliest sources for the presence of
chickens in Europe are Laconian vases dated to the sixth
century BC (the chickens identified by some in early Egyptian
and Minoan wall paintings are in fact guinea fowl). Greek
texts of the fifth century call chickens alektryones
awakeners (a salient trait)"
Food in the Ancient World From A-Z, Andrew Dalby
[Routledge:London] 2003 (p.
83-4) |
"They probably
reached Britain, with Celtic tribes during the 1st century BC. ....
there are numerous references in classical literature...to...their
being served as food at symposia. The Romans bred hens for their
meat, selecting docile, heavy birds...An old English breed, the
Dorking, also shares these characteristics, leading to speculation
that ancestors of these birds flourished in Roman Britain...In 1815
Bonington Moubray was able to specify 12 hen breeds (in his
Practical Treatise on Breeding, Rearing and Fattening all Kinds of
Domestic Poultry, a book which formalized the husbandry of poultry
in Britain."
---Oxford Companion to
Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p.
378)
Adapted from:
The Food Timeline
|
"Linguistics can complement the results of
archaeology in tracking the route of the chicken's diffusion,
If words for chicken, cock, and chick are compiled for the Old
World, some intriguing patterns emerge. There are two
extremely widespread roots, ka(C)i and Tax(V). The latter is
spread from Korea across central Asia to che Near East, North
Africa, and south to Lake Chad. This suggests not only that
the chicken diffused westward from China as far as central
Africa, but that it did so after the principal language phyla
were established, as the vernacular terms form a
chain of loanwords."
K.C. Macdonald &
R.M.Blench - The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge
University Press - 2000)
Chicken isn't so very far from
ka(C)i, is it? Nor, of course, is
Cockerel. |
| Chickens in America Before
Columbus? |
"One of the most intriguing
controversies in the history of chickens is the question of
whether they were present in the New World in pre-European
times. Both G.F.Carter (1971) and R. Langdon (1990) have
argued strongly that they were, at least in parts of the West
Coast. Linguistics (in the sense that chickens do not have
names borrowed from European languages), morphology (the
distinctive blue eggs and melanotic traits (black skins) of
some New World breeds, otherwise known only from China), and
the improbable speed of transmission inland that would be
required by the assumption of a European introduction all
suggest a pre-Columbian introduction from Asia (see also
Carpenter 1985). Against this theory, however, is the fact
that no undisputed early chicken bones have ever been found in
a mainland site, Langdon (1990) has cited reports of blue-egg
fowls on Easter Island, which he considers to strengthen
evidence of trans-Pacific contact with the South American
mainland"
K.C.
Macdonald & R.M.Blench - The Cambridge World History of
Food (Cambridge University Press - 2000).
"On Mocha Island off the coast of Chile, chicken
bones were found that apparently belong to the pre-Columbian
period. Chickens are not native to the Americas and must have
come ultimately from Southeast Asia where they were
domesticated".
Source: Quests of the Dragon and Bird
Clan | |
| A Chicken in Every Pot! |
I can't remember which American President said that, but he
was talking at a time, long ago, when chickens were a
luxury.
(As late as the 1960s, customers at a famous London
banqueting house asked me to assure them their main course was
really chicken, and not just rabbit).
The
Chinese and Egyptians (both with semi-slave societies) first
realized that chickens had a unique flocking and breeding capacity
that outclassed their own coolies and fellahin, and
started the mass-production of poultry and eggs for
food.
But only the late 20th century brought in chicken
industrialization and intensive rearing practices.
Aldous Huxley satirised the new practices in 'Brave New
World'
"The animal charity RSPCA says 800 million
"broiler chickens" bred in the UK every year suffer painful
health problems in cramped conditions.
Broilers regularly
suffer illnesses such as sudden heart failure, leg pain,
ammonia burns and skin infections, the RSPCA
says."
BBC News | UK | RSPCA urges end to chicken
cruelty |
 |
 |
"Chickens are probably the most abused of all
factory-farmed animals. Chicken rearing is the most
intensified and automated type of livestock
production....Broiler sheds are never cleaned out during the
lifetime of one 'crop' of birds so the litter becomes
impregnated with the birds' droppings and urine. This combined
with inadequate ventilation, water spillage from drinkers,
diarrhoea etc can create filthy litter. Forcing the birds to
live in these conditions means they can develop painful hock
burns, breast blisters and ulcerated feet. High ammonia levels
can also cause blindness".
Keeping broilers in
such poor conditions not only inflicts suffering on the birds
but also poses serious threats to human health. Salmonella and
campylobacter, the main sources of food poisoning in humans,
are commonly found in broiler chickens". |
"Most intensively-reared chickens are
slaughtered at about seven weeks of age (42 days) when they
are still baby birds (a chicken's natural life span can be 10
years). A chicken can weigh 5½ lbs at 49 days, twice the
weight of a chicken reared some 30 years ago".
Advocates for Animals - Resources - The Facts about
Broiler
Chickens |
Industrialists have turned chicken, once something of a
luxury for most people, into an inexpensive meat, lacking flavour
and provoking uneasy qualms of conscience. All you have to do is
make a barn and some cages, and buy a few eggs, and away you go,
cheap protein for next to nothing. (Pigs and cows digest different
things, and pass on others, so, if you feed pigshit and cowpats to
your chickens, they will thrive).
It's
only then you discover pernickety customers, who want thigh
drumsticks, but not wings.
Throw the wings away? No way
- dump them somewhere else - which is the reason I can buy very
cheap USA-made chicken wings, but no legs or breasts, in my local
Filipino market - and why I buy 3 of them, and not a whole chicken,
depriving a local chicken grower of business.
The total lack of taste makes chickens very suited to
dishes with distinct added flavours. Many ethnic cuisines are rich
in such dishes, and have become popular in the western world on
tables where they were formerly almost unimaginably
exotic.
Just try to imagine a Saturday night out at the pub
without a Chicken Tikka or Madras to follow.
| "Chickens are classified
by sex and age, although the terms vary considerably,
depending on whether the chickens are in exhibitions, or
commercial poultry production.
Cockerel -
sunoy-sunoy is a male
chicken up to a year old; cock or rooster -
higot is a male more than
one year old; pullet is a female under one year, and hen -
hinankan is a female, and
bantres after a year. When
chicks - piso are first
hatched, they may be separated by sexes and are then called
sexed chicks. If they have not been separated, they are known
as straight-run chicks.
In market terms, a broiler or fryer
is a young meat-type chicken that can be cooked tender by
broiling or frying and usually weighs between 2½ and 3½
pounds. A roaster is a young meat-type chicken that can be
cooked tender by roasting and usually weighs 4 pounds or more.
A stewing chicken, hen, or fowl is a mature female chicken,
often the by-product of egg production, with meat less tender
than that of a roaster and can be cooked tender by stewing or
a similar method."
University of Illinois Extension - What is a
Chicken? | |
 Back to Coconut Studio Index Page
Richard Parker - Siargao Island - November 2004
(Last updated Thursday, April 27, 2006)
I welcome comments or corrections on my
site and opinions, so please feel free to email me at:
richardparker01@yahoo.com
|
