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Chicken Genome Sequenced
Jonmann writes "The chicken (Gallus gallus) genome has been sequenced by the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium. The new genome map provides new, more detailed clues as to how birds diverged from mammals in the course of evolution." I, for one, welcome our new 5-foot-tall, all-white-meat, pre-coated-with-tasty-batter chicken overlords.
Does that make anyone else scratch their head and wonder what other kind of downright stupid consortiums we have? I mean it's a noble cause, no doubt, but calling it a consortium feigns a certain amount of dignity to chicken research that I'm not prepared to give.
hmm all WHITE meat from the WHITE chicken farmers? who may one day visit the WHITE house? Huh. I see how you are.
I for one welcome our DARK meat 8 foot tall DARK feathered chickens, with the crushing toes and the beak and the poking and the crushing and the hey hey it hurts me.
Q: How do you know when a joke has jumped the shark?
A: When even the Slashdot editors are making it!
Come on, they don't even read the site! It's like when your parents start using a slang term, you automatically realise that it's no longer cool.
My bio's a little rusty but aren't chickens in the aves (family? order? whatever? =)) Aves didn't descend from mammals. Aves and mammals share a common ancestor in perhaps the dinosaurs...
I feel the same way. The lives these farm raised animals live bothers me more than they have to die for my consumption. I don't eat a lot of meat, but I can't see cutting it out completely.
It confuses me when fellow meat eaters are repulsed by hunting, even if the hunter plans on eating his kill. Seems to me a free life cut short by a swift death is preferrable to short life crammed in a cage. I had a suitemate in college who didn't eat meat but would eat eggs. He didn't seem to realize that the enslaved chicken whose eggs he was eating was going to end up just as dead and be eaten by either another person or farm animal.
And possibly no feathers.
A commercial chicken's purpose in life (if you can call it living) is to eat and produce eggs, meat, or more chickens.
When you farm chickens, the goal is to get as much non-human-consumable protein and carbohydrate into salable form as possible. Feathers, beaks, feet, and less desireable parts need to be minimized in order to fulfill the goal.
Gene-spliced chickens can solve some of this, producing more usable foodstuff.
The previous solution, however, was to simply have the USDA regulate that ALL parts of a chicken are "chicken". Remember that the next time you eat a chicken nugget.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
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A commercial chicken's purpose in life (if you can call it living) is to eat and produce eggs, meat, or more chickens.
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Exactly. Whereas a chicken's purpose in the wild is to eat, produce eggs, more chicken and feed foxes.
The commercial exploitation of chickens is absolutely horrible.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
You can quibble over whether it is an appropriate term, but that's the sense in which the word has been used for nearly a century and in which it's used today.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
They still do not know what came first.