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June 12, 2015

Strange But True!

Q. What would the world be like without any chickens — all 22 billion (22,000,000,000) of them?

A. “Chickenless, we humans would face ‘a starving world,'” says molecular biologist Olivier Hanotte, as reported to Andrew Lawler in New Scientist magazine. Close to one-third of the world's meat supply and nearly all of its eggs would vanish, Lawler adds. “The chicken-human bond is ancient, forming roughly 3,000 years ago in the Pacific islands. To the ancient Greeks, the bird was sacred to their god of healing,” and today chickens have become “staggeringly abundant, outnumbering all the pigs and cows on the planet combined.” There are now about three chickens for every person on the planet. Humans gobble about 100 million metric tons of chicken meat and over 1 trillion eggs annually. “On a single day this year, Super Bowl Sunday, Americans ate an estimated 1.25 billion chicken wings.”


 
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