In our February 12 issue, Ian Frazier helpfully dispenses with a durable riddle: “According to people knowledgeable about chickens, the egg came first.” With that matter settled, he proceeds to tell the story of modern chickens, which as recently as 1940 barely featured in the average diet but are now “the most populous terrestrial vertebrate”—comprising “70 percent of all birds by weight” and “45 percent of all the meat that Americans eat.”

Frazier surveys the history of poultry, from their ancestor the red jungle fowl to “a craze called Hen Fever” that swept Boston in the nineteenth century to the contemporary fashion for raising backyard chickens and finally to the industrial farm, “a Dantean hellscape.”

Below, alongside Frazier’s essay, are five articles from our archives about birds.

Ian Frazier
Bang the Drumstick Slowly

About 26 billion chickens occupy Earth, but apart from the lucky ones in backyards, most are condemned to the hellscape that is industrial farming.

Tim Flannery
The Sense of an Endling

In the early nineteenth century, the idea of species extinction was an alien concept. That changed after an expedition to Iceland in search of the last of the great auks.

—December 5, 2024

Daniel M. Lavery
Coq au Pépin

“It is through the chicken that most American cooks acquaint themselves with the techniques of butchery, if they butcher at all, and often it is through the work of Jacques Pépin that the introduction is made. Few can say, as Pépin does in his most recent book, Art of the Chicken, ‘I was about seven years old the first time I actively took part in cooking a chicken without adult supervision.’”

—October 5, 2023

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Robert O. Paxton
Intrepid Navigators

Migration’s demands on birds are as daunting mentally as they are physically.

—February 25, 2021

Peter Singer
Open the Cages!

“The problems of chicken production are not simply due to the fact that the birds are raised in vast crowded sheds, in air reeking of ammonia from their accumulated droppings. The more fundamental problem is that today’s chickens have been bred to grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s. Now they are ready for market when they are just six weeks old and their immature legs cannot handle the weight they gain. As a result…, about one third of them are in chronic pain for the last third of their lives.”

—May 12, 2016

Elizabeth Kolbert
They Covered the Sky, and Then…

“Some sense of what it was like to watch a flock of passenger pigeons pass overhead comes from the accounts of America’s early colonists. William Strachey, an English gentleman, was sailing to Virginia on board the Sea Venture when it foundered off Bermuda in 1609.… Strachey finally made it to the colony the following year and described pigeons of he knew not ‘how manie thousands’ filling the sky ‘like so many thickned clowdes.’”

—January 9, 2014

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