When my chicken Joan was still alive, people often looked at her black and white barred feathers and yellow legs and referred to her breed as a “Barred Rock”. Their mistake was understandable. The Plymouth Barred Rock is one of the most popular chicken breeds to have in a backyard (and were the go-to variety for broilers until WWII when more productive breeds were developed). But Joan was not a Barred Rock and I always got strangely miffed by their mistake—in that way that sometimes happens when someone misgenders your dog, not that the dog cares. “She’s a Dominique,” I’d answer, trying not to sound too much like an insufferable know-it-all (and almost certainly failing). “Dominiques are the oldest chicken breed in America. Dominiques have a rose comb; Rocks have a single comb.”
The visual distinctions between breeds often come down to piddly differences like this: one has a beard and the other doesn’t; one’s legs are green and the other’s yellow; one has a tail that sticks straight up and the other has no tail at all. In the history of the domesticated chicken, specifically defined breeds are a blip in time. The very first breed standard published in America only came out in 1874, mostly thanks to the sudden rise in popularity of poultry shows and exotic chicken breeds. Today the American Poultry Association (APA), the oldest livestock organization in the United States, publishes a new copy of this book—referred to, loftily, as The Standard of Perfection—roughly every five years though there’s no set schedule.
The very first copy was a 100-page text-only booklet of descriptions. (The Dominique is included in the first Standard, in case you were wondering.) In 1888, the APA attempted the first illustrated version which used crude “outline pen drawings, purporting to show correct Standard shape” according to the 1906 reprint of the Standard. “The pictures met with widespread disfavor and the edition was declared obsolete.” In 1905, after two years of painstaking work, the first properly illustrated Standard was published filled with pencil drawings of hens and cocks by the best-known poultry artists of the era. (Poultry journals were so popular at the time that it’s not entirely surprising that this could be an artistic specialty.)
Irvin Web Burgess made 8 illustrations for the 1905 standard and 32 for the 1910 edition.
At first these pencil drawings were a necessity—photographs were expensive and required the subject to sit so still that it would have been impossible to capture a chicken in a show-worthy pose. Curiously, even after photography became easier and less expensive, the APA continued using illustrations. One practical reason was that they didn’t want to appear to be showing preferential treatment to one breeder by using his birds and not another’s. But there was another fact they had to take into account: a bird that exemplified the standard of its breed simply did not exist. Nearly 140 years after the first standard was produced, this is still the case. “No bird yet produced is perfect,” says APA secretary David Adkins.
In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, he describes a set of prisoners chained to a wall watching what is, in effect, a shadow puppet show. The prisoners don’t know that the real people and objects making the shadows are behind the prisoners’ heads and, at least in Plato’s story, the prisoners begin to believe that the shadows are reality. It’s a metaphor for real life where, according to Plato’s Theory of Forms, we might see trees and houses and even concepts like friendship and believe that they are the “real thing” when they’re just shadows of a perfect version of it that exists on a metaphysical plane. It’s a lot of philosophy, I know. (Another way people often describe it is by using the circle—we all know what the perfect 360-degree circle looks like in our heads and yet we’re prepared to call “inferior” shapes a circle as long as they’re reasonably circular.)
This isn’t so different from chicken breeds (or dog breeds or horse breeds or anything else that has a Standard to be judged against). The Standard of Perfection is the Platonic ideal in action. When people see a Polish chicken with its mop of hair, they can identify the breed even if that chicken—and literally no chicken ever—has been the "Standard” Polish.
Yet breeders chase after this idea of perfection. Of course, the result is the colorful world of nearly 400 chicken breeds and varieties recognized by the APA today (and many more farmyard mixes). We’ve created a world where humans don’t just pick out any old chicken to add to their flock but seemingly endless shape and color combinations (not to mention the different personalities or egg colors). We only have this because breeders decided to take part in the Sisyphean task of breeding and hatching the perfect bird. Maybe it was all worth it?
But then I think about all the unintended consequences of chasing perfection.
Rather than raising flocks of hundreds or thousands of chickens, breeders cull (which can mean anything from gifting a bird as a pet to killing) chickens that don’t further their breeding programs. These are usually perfectly heathy birds that simply aren’t up to the Standard. And, when hatcheries list birds for sale, people place orders for exactly the chick breeds they want and nothing else. Sometimes a hatchery might have too few of one breed (leaving those orders unfulfilled) and too many of another. Chicks that don’t sell—whether because they’re roosters or simply didn’t have an order—don’t go to good homes. They’re gassed. This is what happens when we expect to get exactly what we want and nothing else. The search for perfection is not without consequences. It’s hard not to be reminded of that quote commonly attributed to Voltaire: “perfect is the enemy of good.”
(Joan the imperfectly perfect Dominique)
It seems strange that we can define a breed based on a general set of characteristics and yet hold it up against something that is perfect and therefore impossible. Animals so invariably stray from their type that there are common terms like “hatchery-” or “pet-quality” used to describe those not fit for show. While Joan was unquestionably a Dominique she would never have been held up as an example of her breed. I’m sure there were other issues but, most visibly, the toes on one of her feet were crooked from birth. But I still could never stand to let someone get her breed wrong.
I’d chosen her because I wanted to have a chicken breed that was the oldest breed in America, dammit, and nothing else would do. Why had this become so important? Probably just because it existed as something I could have. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it and I wanted other people to recognize the choices I’d made.
Today people in food and agriculture often talk about the need to keep genetic diversity within livestock populations by continuing to keep rare or heritage breeds of chickens or sheep or cows going. But that requires a lot of effort just to perpetuate breeds that humans created in the first place. These aren’t species of wild animals that have a place in the ecosystem; they’re all gallus gallus domesticus. There would be plenty of genetic diversity if we just mixed all the chickens together and let them do what comes naturally too. What would the perfect form of a Platonic chicken look like then?
News from the Coop
I’ve been working hard on the forthcoming chicken book, Under the Henfluence. Did you know that there are a lot of words in a book? As it turns out, as the author, I’m expected to write all of them!
Loretta has been going through a hard molt and looks a bit like an old mop that needs replacing. Meanwhile, I’m so pleased to report that my aloof tiny chicken Scully has been coming around and now accepts pets without running away. Her breed is supposed to be a friendly one and I was worried that she might be a shy outlier but it seems like she just took longer than usual to get out of the typical skittish teen phase. (I’ve been there, Scully.)
I’m planning to winterize the coop in the next few weeks to keep out the drafts and make it a little cozier and drier during our rainy PNW winters. It’s not actually that hard but I dread it every year. It’s easily my least favorite chicken chore.
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If you liked this email, please share it with a chicken or animal lover in your life! As always, email me at underthehenfluence@gmail.com with any tips or comments. See you in a few weeks.
-Tove