Poultry selection is based on systematic observation of what happens in nature. From the 1950s to the present day, the industry has set itself the task of observing what the best choices are in order to select the healthiest and most balanced animal while paying constant attention to its quality of life. The ultimate aim is to identify a healthy and economical source of nutrition to be made available to millions of people around the world with conscience, responsibility, seriousness and constant commitment, which the industry, however, often forgets to adequately communicate to the consumer public.
In the poultry sector, the selection of the best animals takes place without any chemical or physical interference, but simply through the ability to identify and facilitate steps that nature would take more slowly. ‘In nature’, changes occur in an environment where development and natural selection are based on chance. The poultry industry simply creates the conditions for chance to occur by making sure that instead of by chance or who knows when, it happens in a sufficiently short time. For example, in order to develop animals that can withstand the cold, breeding temperatures are lowered a little and in that specific situation, the individuals and families that perform best in those conditions are selected. From those animals we obtain chicks that will be reared at even lower temperatures and so on until we obtain chicks suitable for breeding farms where temperatures are expected to be different than elsewhere. But this is just one example.
The system then takes care of the selected animal by indulging its needs, selected aptitudes and taking care of its specific wellbeing through constant observation of its social life and individual behaviour, and these additional attentions allow it to develop without the hindrances that captivity would instead produce.
This is why growth is faster in poultry farms, precisely because the obstacles to development, which in the wild are various and numerous, are constantly removed.
In poultry farms, we imitate what we humans have always observed and practised on ourselves when we try to make life easier for ourselves by eliminating what prevents us from growing healthy, when we defend ourselves against the cold, against disease, when we choose what to eat … by doing this we manage to live better, healthier and longer.
And it is by acting in this way, and not because of some phantom intervention cited by the numerous fakes that circulate, that animals grow faster and with a certain amount of serenity … which is the opposite of what the ‘popular’ chatter describes, which stems from the lack of information disseminated … because those who do not know and cannot know, but are driven by some form of curiosity, even induced curiosity, eventually compensate for their ‘mortified’ curiosity by inventing fantasy scenarios.
The consequence of care and attention instead produces facts: the animal is robust, its development is faster and this brings with it the positive side-effect of also having a healthy and therefore safe animal for those in the supply chain who enter into a ‘relationship’ with it, be it another animal or the man who breeds or feeds it.
The ‘internal’ supply chain, the one that ordinary people do not see, is hyper-controlled and guided by the constant training of the people who work in it so that optimal conditions are created and consolidated at each stage of the rearing process in respect of the animal’s welfare.
The evolution of the chicken we know today, and eat, is therefore the work of a managed natural selection that in a few decades has led the poultry industry to significantly decrease its part of the footprint on the Planet
The Editors of M.A.C.
