{"id":35597,"date":"2018-06-28T08:11:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-28T13:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35597"},"modified":"2018-06-28T08:11:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T13:11:40","slug":"permaculture-chickens-6-practical-lessons-from-the-evolution-of-chickens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35597","title":{"rendered":"Permaculture Chickens–6 Practical Lessons From the Evolution of Chickens"},"content":{"rendered":"

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PERMACULTURE CHICKENS \u2013 6 PRACTICAL LESSONS FROM THE EVOLUTION OF CHICKENS<\/a><\/h3>\n

One of the fundamentals of permaculture design is to observe, understand and work with natural ecosystems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It sounds simple enough to apply permaculture principles to chicken keeping. Can\u2019t we just observe wild chickens in their natural environment? The problem is, modern domesticated chickens don\u2019t exist in the wild. Junglefowl are the immediate ancestor of chickens, however it\u2019s not that simple.<\/p>\n

Modern chickens were domesticated more than 8,000 years ago and have changed a lot as a result of selective breeding. To get a more complete picture, that accounts for the differences between modern chickens and Junglefowl, I\u2019ve studied the evolution of chickens from the Asian jungle, to modern factory farming and chicken nuggets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I have distilled this research into 6 lessons for a permaculture approach to happy, healthy, backyard chickens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Evolution of Chickens<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before I jump into the 6 lessons for permaculture chickens, I\u2019ll start by setting the scene with a brief history and evolution of the modern domestic chicken.<\/p>\n

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Junglefowl \u2013 The chicken\u2019s immediate ancestor:<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Jason Thompson \u2013 Flickr: Red Junglefowl<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Domestic chickens can be traced back to\u202f\u00a0Red Junglefowl<\/a>, from South East Asia and India. Jungle fowl have small lean bodies and they only lay about 20 eggs each year.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>If we trace chickens back even further, chickens are the closest living relative of the T-Rex. This makes a lot of sense because chickens go crazy for meat, hunt down insects and even small rodents. And check out this incredible video of a chicken grabbing (stealing) a mouse that was being hunted down by a cat: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LwtuoHyLEiw<\/a>\u202f\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

Domestication and family farming (1900s to 1950):<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Junglefowl were domesticated around 8,000 years ago. Despite domesticated chickens being very different \u2018physically\u2019 to jungle fowl, studies show that genetic differences are actually pretty small.<\/a>\u202fThis study<\/a> of the genetic evolution of chickens shows there are two important mutations:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PERMACULTURE CHICKENS \u2013 6 PRACTICAL LESSONS FROM THE EVOLUTION OF CHICKENS One of the fundamentals of permaculture design is to observe, understand and work with natural ecosystems.\u00a0 It sounds simple enough to apply permaculture principles to chicken keeping. Can\u2019t we just observe wild chickens in their natural environment? The problem is, modern domesticated chickens don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5237,20724,20725,8756,8748,9358],"class_list":["post-35597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-chickens","tag-eggs","tag-marcus-looby","tag-meat","tag-permaculture-news","tag-permaculture-research-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35598,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35597\/revisions\/35598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}