by Barry Kent MacKay
This is a much shortened version of what you will read if you are on Barry’s email list. Be sure to contact Barry MacKay, Bird Artist, Illustrator. His contact information is below.
The Red Jungle Fowl has been domesticated for thousands of years. It is widely known as the chicken. There are between about 25 and 35 billion of them, world-wide, give or take a few billion! The Red Jungle Fowl has been domesticated for thousands of years. It is widely known as the chicken. There are between about 25 and 35 billion of them, world-wide, give or take a few billion!
Sadly, the demand for their meat and eggs coupled with greed-driven desire to maximize production of both has resulted in two things: One, the grace, color and elegance of form that contribute to what I see as the beauty of the wild progenitor has, through intensively selective breeding directed at maximum profiting, resulted in a scraggly, essentially or quite flightless all-white bird. And worse, almost all are kept under abysmal conditions that deny them the ability to exercise natural behavior or experience the infinitely textured richness of lives led at the tip of three billion years of past evolutionary history. It’s part of what motivates my own vegan diet.
And yet, I had enjoyed the appearance and strutting behavior of the rooster in charge of a group of most contented hens living, at the moment, under the kind of idyllic conditions featured in children’s books about farm animals, and so I painted my first domestic bird, a rooster.
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mimus@sympatico.ca