[MCN] Chickens' past, present -- and future?

[Lance Olsen]

Financial Times February 19, 2016 10:57 am

Are these the chickens of the future?
Disease-resistant and sustained by low-cost feed, 
genetically modified poultry could one day be the 
answer to soaring global demand for meat
Anjana Ahuja
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/863e034e-d5c8-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html

Excerpt

Today's commercially bred chickens look far 
bulkier than did their puny forebears from a 
century ago - and vastly different to red 
junglefowl, the wild bird from which they are 
thought to be descended. After the second world 
war, consumers craved cheap protein. Breeders 
selected birds for meatiness without always 
getting, or preserving, the genes for 
correspondingly strong bones. Today, there are 
too many broilers (chickens bred for meat) 
propped up by brittle skeletons and serviced by 
overworked hearts. The animal welfare charity 
Peta says the average breast of an eight-week-old 
chicken is seven times heavier than it was 25 
years ago.

"I don't think people understand how successful 
poultry-breeding genetics has been in changing 
the characteristics of chickens since the second 
world war," says Sang. "But those initial goals 
were not particularly good for the welfare of the 
animal."

All those changes were wrought by selective 
breeding, which means basically picking out 
animals with the desired characteristics and 
mating them. Now companies such as Aviagen, 
Hy-Line and Cobb-Vantress - which sell 
trademarked pedigree breeds (such as Aviagen's 
Ross 308) that are used to produce millions of 
supermarket birds - have realised that science 
can replace pedigree information with genome 
information. According to the British Poultry 
Council, selective breeding programmes can 
already target 40 characteristics that fall under 
genetic influence, from bone health and the 
oxygen-carrying capacity of blood (a proxy for 
heart health) to food efficiency and growth rate.

Full story here:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/863e034e-d5c8-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html

-- 
===========================================================
  "The effects of climate change will be 'severe, 
pervasive and irreversible' within the next few 
decades if countries burn more than just 
one-quarter of the fossil fuel reserves already 
found, according to a major new U.N. draft report"

"It warns that companies and governments have 
'identified reserves of these [fossil] fuels at 
least four times larger than could safely be 
burned if global warming is to be kept to a 
tolerable level.' In short, 75 percent of the 
fossil fuels must remain in the ground to 
forestall devastating impacts."

http://www.newsweek.com/leaked-un-report-climate-change-impacts-already-inevitable-may-soon-be-irreversible-266860

===============================================================
"I believe humanity is making risky bets in the 
climate casino. Š.  But it is always possible 
that humanity will wake up .... If that happened, 
fossil fuel reserves would indeed be stranded. 
Investors beware: the risk of that cannot be 
zero."

Martin Wolf. A climate fix would ruin investors.
Financial Times. June 17, 2014
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5a2356a4-f58e-11e3-afd3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3C5hyxJyx


Bold emphases added
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