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RED
ROVING FOWL |
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| India, which
gave the red jungle fowl, the mother of all
poultry to the rest of the world, is now importing
poultry from outside and destroying its own
indigenous species. Today these unique breeds are
disappearing, partly because of neglect and partly
because of crossbreeding; about 99 per cent of all
wild populations have been contaminated by
domestic or feral chicken. But certain rare breeds
still exist and there is time to save
them |
|
POULTRY BREED
DESCRIPTION |
RED JUNGLE FOWL(GALLUS
GALLUS)
Country of
origin/range: North and northeast
India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand,
Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia.
Contributed genes to: All
breeds of domestic chicken
Body
weight: Cock: 672-1450 g, hen: 485-1050
g
Height: Cock: 65-75 cm,
Hen: 42-46 cm
Comb:
Single
Egg shell colour:
Brown
Feather
colour: Red-brown in neck, back
and wing; black on chest, legs and
tail
Eggs: Average of
five-six eggs in a sitting
MAP NOT TO
SCALE |
| Source:
Graphic narration of red jungle
fowl’s spread from Poultry Biology, Part I,
Chapter I: Origin and History of Poultry
Species, R D Crawford; Grzimek’s Animal Life
Encyclopedia, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company,
1987 | |
DANIEL MADHAV FITZPATRICK
AND KAZIMUDDIN AHMED
Long before the birth of Christ,
a bird, never seen before in the valley of the Blue
Nile, reached the court of the pharaohs. Neither the
architectural grandeur of the court nor the
‘gold-draped’ Pharaohs could silhouette its beauty. A
bright red comb rested regally on its head and shiny
green and red feathers clothed its body finally ending
in an eclipse plume. The Egyptians had never seen a bird
which laid so many eggs. When it crowed, they listened
with rapt attention. When it walked around the court,
everyone made way. It became a showpiece in the
Pharaoh’s court. Fascinated, they adopted the bird.
Everbody used to be shown the chicken and training camps
were set up on how to get this wild red jungle fowl
(RJF) to lay eggs.
But much before the bird reached Egypt, available
literature suggests that RJF (Gallus gallus) was
first domesticated in the twin cities of Mohenjodaro and
Harappa in the Indus valley around 2500-2100 BC. Seals
were found at Mohenjodaro depicting fighting cocks.
Various clay figurines of the fowl were also found,
including one of a hen with a feed dish. Two clay
figurines were found at Harappa appearing to represent a
cock and a hen.
While most wild animals were domesticated for meat,
in the case of RJF, which belongs to the family of
pheasants, it was for its fighting abilities. In
Bhavprakash Nighantu, a book on ayurveda by
Acharya Bhavprakash, he states that the Vedas, too,
praise the fowl for its ‘courage’. Referred to as
kukuth, it says that among the 20 qualities such
as courage that a human being should possess, four
should be acquired from the fowl alone.
The Indians were also the first to realise its
medicinal and nutritional worth. Special attention has
been paid to the bird in the ayurvedic system of
medicine also. "The fowl is a medicine in itself,"
agrees Vaidya Balendu Prakash of the Vaidya Chandra
Prakash Cancer Research Foundation, Dehradun. Rich in
minerals such as copper and iron, in course of time, the
fowl also became a welcome bribe (see box: Wonder
bird).
THE WONDER
BIRD
The red jungle fowl (RJF) is one of the
four jungle fowls found in the Indian subcontinent
belonging to the genus Gallus, the other
three being grey, Ceylon and green. It is also
know as Gallus bankiva or Gallus gallus
murghi.
RJF is distinct in its appearance. It’s
strikingly colourful plumes and a majestic red
comb gives it a regal appearance. But what makes
it unique is the eclipse plumage, which is now
used to identify the bird. According to Satya
Kumar, scientist at the Wildlife Institute of
India, Dehradun: "The shape of the plumage makes
it easier for the bird to escape quickly from
predators through undergrowths and bushes."
The male plumage and the colour of the ear
lobes differ according to the climate and
geographical location. The shade of red varies
from golden yellow to dark mahogany. There are
also some differences in shape and length of the
neck feathers among males. This divides the red
jungle fowl into five clear subspecies:
Cochin-Chinese red, Burmese red, Tonkinese red,
Indian red and Javan red. Among unique
characteristics of RJF is that it sheds its plumes
in the summer. The hen, which can lay up to nine
eggs in one sitting, has no visible comb or
wattle.
The RJF population is distributed across the
Indo-Malay peninsula. Apart from varied
geographical locations, it also lives in most
varied habitats — from rainforests to
drylands. |
 |
| People
can easily mistake the red jungle fowl for a
common domestic bird and it could, therefore, end
up in the cooking pot rather than delight an
ornithologist. |
From the centre
of domestication, the fowl soon moved where trade took
the Indo-Aryans. Persia, modern day Iran, was possibly
one the first countries to receive the domestic fowl
from northwest India as part of the trade connections
between the agricultural areas of the Indo-Gangetic
plain and the Fertile Crescent. The Persians then took
it to Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), from where it went
down to Asia Minor. In the 7th-8th century BC, it moved
further to Greece and, by the 5th-6th century BC, it had
encompassed a large area of the Mediterranean basin,
where it received special privileges and honour in the
Roman empire. The Romans considered it as sacred to
Mars, the God of war, while Plato wrote of people
cock-fighting instead of labouring.
 |
What
makes it unique is the eclipse plumage, which is
now used to identify the bird. An artist’s
rendition of the red jungle fowl (below)
— Ram Kinker
Baij (Delhi Art
Gallery) |
In Egypt,
domestic fowl became firmly established under Greek and
Persian influence. Several pictorial and written
artefacts have been found in Egypt. One of them is a
rooster’s head in a mural from the tomb of Rekhmara,
vizier of Thutmose III (1479-1447 BC) at Thebes.
Discovered in 1835, the drawings appeared in several
books on Egyptian art and archaeology. The first
reproduction was in Travels in Ethopia published
in 1835. The mural depicted a procession of 50 human
figures representing many races bringing tribute to
Thutmose III. The tribute include a variety of animals
and birds. Among them was a gold image of the head of a
rooster with a pea comb and features of RJF.
The other
possible route the fowl took while travelling to many
parts of the globe is to Europe via the Black Sea
through China and Russia. Ancient Chinese documents also
indicate that the fowl was introduced in the country as
early as the 13th or 14th century BC. The rooster is one
of the 12 astrological signs in the Chinese calendar.
They also reached the Germanic and Celtic tribes before
the Christian era. They were brought to the us about 470
years ago with the European conquests.
Along with its
spread, the fowl was christened according to the local
dialect. For instance, pullet (young hen) in
Latin comes from the word pil in
Sanskrit.
|
It is said that among the 20
qualities such as courage that a human being
should possess, four should be acquired from the
fowl |
| The fowl’s diffusion rate is quite
remarkable. It has been estimated at 1.5-3
kilometres a year, similar to the diffusion rate
of technologies |
Similarly, chicken and cock comes from Sanskrit
kukuth or kukutha. Nomenclature aside,
everywhere it went, it was regarded as a special bird
(see box: Cocktale).
COCKTALE
As the red jungle
fowl started travelling across the globe, its
connections to different aspects of human life
also grew. It assumed the responsibility of
sounding the wake-up call to humans. Because of
this role, it was regarded as the Herald of Dawn
and the guardian of good over evil in Zoroastrian.
The call of the fowl means liberation from
darkness. So profound was the veneration that by
1000 BC Zoroastrianism forbade the eating of the
fowl. In Christian religious art, the crowing cock
symbolised the resurrection of Christ. It was also
the emblem of the first French Republic.
The Yoruba
people of West Africa believe that the chicken
made land on earth. As the story goes, the Sky God
lowered his son Oduduwa and a five-toed chicken
down a great chain from the heavens to the ancient
waters. Along with the chicken, Oduduwa had a
handful of dirt and a palm nut. He threw the dirt
on the water. The chicken busily scratched and
scattered the dirt all around until it formed the
first dry land on earth.
In India,
too, there are many beliefs and tales on the bird.
One among them is the story of Goddess Kamakhya
and the demon that wished to get wedded to her. He
threatened mass destruction if she refused him.
She then put a condition before him.
Underestimating the demon’s capability, he was
asked to build a temple overnight and the next
morning she would be his. The demon got down to
work and was in the process of finishing the
temple much before dawn. Seeing that her trick did
not work, she asked her trusted fowl to crow. Just
before the last few bricks were to be laid, the
fowl gave a full-throttled crow. And declared the
arrival of dawn. The temple was left incomplete
and the goddess was spared the ignominy of
marrying a demon. The temple is now one of the
most sacred pilgrimage sites and is located in
Guwahati, Assam.
These
are only a few stories about the fowl’s liaison
with deities and lesser mortals. |
The diffusion
rate of the fowl is quite remarkable. In the book,
The Chicken in America (1975), G F Carter, using
dates of first records in widely separated places,
estimated the rate to be between 1.5-3 kilometres a year
— reasonably consistent with rates of other things like
technologies and ideas. Backyard poultry became common.
Soon people started developing newer breeds with
selective cross breeding with other fowl, depending upon
their egg laying and meat yielding characteristics.
After a long period of trial and error the Asiatic, us
and English breeds of the ‘chicken’ that we have today
were finally born. All trace their parentage to RJF.
Today, it has become a source of food for a large
percentage of the world’s population. It is estimated
that around 14,000 million tonnes of chicken was
consumed in 1996 the world over. Unfortunately, in
India, the land where it was domesticated first, the
bird is almost forgotten. A recent study suggests that
there may not be any pure strains of RJF left in the
country. Worse still, nobody knows for sure because of
the lack of research on the bird that gave us today’s
‘table God’.
Birds of a feather
Is the RJF
extinct in the wild?
 There are scientific
theories on the monophyletic (tracing origin to one
ancestor) and polyphyletic (many ancestors) origin of
modern day fowls. The former goes with the theory of
Charles Darwin (1868) that RJF is the sole ancestor of
all the domestic chicken. He considered RJF the sole
ancestor because, among other things, domestic fowls
mated freely with RJF and progeny from this were
fertile. The second theory says other three jungle fowl
species — Celyon, grey and green — could also have
contributed to the domestic fowl. The majority opinion,
however, goes with the former theory attributing RJF as
the mother of all domestic fowl.
If one goes by the popular belief on RJF origin, a
paper, "Genetic endangerment of wild red jungle fowl
Gallus gallus?", published in 1999 in Bird
Conservation International by two us scientists Lehr
Brisbin and A Townsend Peterson, is bad news for India
and RJF. According to the authors, RJF has been
genetically-contaminated over the years and there might
be no pure strain of the fowl left. A survey of the 745
museum specimens of the RJF suggests that
"percentagewise, about 99 per cent of captive
populations and potentially all of wild populations have
been contaminated by introgression of genes from
domestic or feral chicken".
The researchers say that this is evident from
observing the male eclipse plumage, an important
indicator of a pure RJF. Although the eclipse plumage is
somewhat observed in central and western populations, it
has not been observed in eastern populations. The
plumage is believed to have disappeared from Malaysia
and the neighbouring countries by the 1920s. In extreme
Southeast Asia and the Philippines, it is said to have
disappeared even before scientific documentation began
around the 1860s. The good news is the researchers did
find some pure stock, though dismally low scattered in
South Asia. In India and Nepal, the percentage of
specimens having eclipse plumage was calculated at 18.2
per cent and 19.4 per cent in Myanmar, Thailand and
Malaysia. Other typical characteristics that were taken
into consideration were the dusky black legs and the
lack of comb in the hen. So far, the authors have only
taken the external morphology into consideration, but at
present they are preparing to initiate deoxyribonucleic
acid (DNA) studies in collaboration with several chicken
genome laboratories.
The authors claim that the only pure RJF strains are
the ones with them. Collected from western India in the
1960s, they now number 50-100. "They have been kept
under typical avicultural conditions at several aviaries
across usa," says Peterson, who is also associate
professor and curator, Natural History Museum and
Biodiversity Research Centre, University of Kansas.
Peterson describes the species as "critically
endangered". "This is funny given that the species was
not even imagined to be in trouble prior to our work,
but it may well be effectively
|
"About 99 per cent of captive RJF
populations and potentially all wild populations
have been contaminated by domestic or feral
chicken" |
extinct in the wild... replaced by
chickens-in-jungle
fowl-clothing," he adds.
Hopeful, still
Although the researchers have given evidence on
the genetic contamination of RJF, other experts say that
the scenario is not as pitiable as portrayed by them. "I
know that there are still pure populations of red jungle
fowl in several areas," says Ludo Pinceel, coordinator
for research and education of the European Jungle Fowl
Group (EJFG), Belgium. Agrees Satya Kumar of Wildlife
Institute of India, Dehradun, "There are good stocks in
several protected areas of India like the Kalesar
reserve forest in Haryana. These stocks show many pure
RJF features." He is also optimistic that the fowl
population in Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and
Haryana have no or negligible gene contamination, but
has no scientific studies to back his claim.
There are apprehensions, however, on what "pure"
means. Given the status of poor research and
conservation, it is very hard to give correct facts and
figures. According to Rahul Kaul,
|
"About 99 per cent of captive RJF
populations and potentially all wild populations
have been contaminated by domestic or feral
chicken" |
South Asia coordinator of the World Pheasant
Association, the debate and the apprehensions will
continue till the genetic mapping of RJF is done. But
this is easier said than done. "The basic problem is we
do not have a definite DNA of a RJF that we can call
‘pure’ so we can compare other RJF DNAs. The us,
apparently, has the right markers," he says.
Although initiatives have been taken to develop
markers and study RJF genes, there are hurdles on the
way. Besides the money factor, research on genetics is
turning out to be very time consuming, says Kaul. "But
now that the issue of contamination has been raised, no
research will be complete without taking the genetic
aspects into account," he says.
| The
rooster finds a place on the walls of tribal
people’s houses |
 |
There are a lot of references to the RJF in books
written during the period of the British Raj. It has
been mentioned as a favourite game bird. But that is all
about the information that is there on RJF during the
last two centuries, says Kaul. "There are a few RJF in
zoos. But the concept of record keeping or observation
of the birds is just not there. Even the origin of many
RJF in zoos is not known," he adds.
Unsafe or secure?
Amid the gloom surrounding RJF data, an
experiment in Haryana gives some
hope
According to the World
Conservation Union’s listing, the bird is safe and
secure. But it appears in India’s Wildlife (Protection)
Act, 1972, as a Schedule IV species — no hunting of the
bird is permitted. "Until now, RJF was considered as
‘not globally threatened’. But in the light of our
present knowledge, we think that ‘seriously endangered’
would be a better qualification," says Pinceel.
"Normally one should think there are enough populations
left in the huge area in which they occur, but the major
question is of purity. The problem is that there are a
lot of red jungle fowl like birds, but perhaps they are
seriously infected with domestic genes," he says.
Amid the lack of awareness and neglect of RJF in
India, there is but one effort in saving the fowl that
stands out — the captive breeding programme of RJF in
Morni Hills, Haryana, undertaken by the Haryana State
Forest Department. Started in 1991-92 with some local
stock of RJF and eggs that were collected from the
jungle, the stock is kept in an enclosure. In 1998, they
successfully introduced 14 birds in the wild followed by
seven in 1999.
Though the reason for starting the project was
not out of concern for RJF per se, now the objective has
shifted to reintroducing mature birds in the wild and
replenishing the wild stock. S K Khanna, a veterinary
specialist with the Government Poultry Disease and Feed
Analytical Laboratory, Ambala, Haryana, explains the
reason behind their objective. Habitat destruction and
consequent decrease in RJF numbers could lead to an
increase in some insect population, which make up a part
of the RJF’s diet. The Morni Hills project will thus
give a chance to scientists to study the impact of RJF
on insect population and the health of the population
living in areas where there is human-jungle interface.
They can also study the productivity and
immunoresistance capabilities of the fowl. "This is a
long-term project. To begin with, we have been slow
because of lack of technical skill and funding," says
Khanna. "But as of now, there are no studies to show
that decrease in RJF population could lead to subsequent
increase in insect population," says Kaul.
| The captive breeding
project in Morni Hills, near Chandigarh, aims to
replenish wild stocks of the red jungle fowl. So
far, it has already released 21 of
them |
 |
 |
According to
Satya Kumar, the Morni Hills stock is healthy and shows
all the traits that the pure jungle fowl has. "We can
say that the stock is relatively pure," he says. With a
healthy population of the RJF in the nearby Kalesar
reserve forest, the Morni Hills programme does seem to
hold some promise for research on the RJF. "We are
planning set up sub
|
"Until now, RJF was considered as
‘not globally threatened... but we think that
‘seriously endangered’ would be a better
qualification" |
centres as well and we are also trying to analyse and
clear all the proposals for research that are given to
us. As the genetic contamination issue is very important
now, we have to look into every aspect of RJF," says P R
Sinha, member secretary, Central Zoo Authority,
Delhi.
The tangri
is a considered a delicacy in India. But with the
new World Trade Organisation rules, they may not
be so for chicken breeders across the
country |
According to
Pinceel, the Wildlife Institute at Bologna, Italy, is
also working on a large World Pheasant Association
project, particularly the four species of jungle fowl.
One of the most important aims is to find a method to
recognise hybrids from RJF. But wildlife samples for
taxonomic studies are not allowed to be exported from
India. "This would somewhat slow the research work which
is in progress in various labs, because these
laboratories will miss important reference samples. It
would be important if DNA research on RJF could be
implemented in India, perhaps in collaboration with
other laboratories throughout the world," says Ettore
Randi, Pinceel’s colleague.
"There are a few RIF
in zoos. But the concept of record keeping or
observation of the birds is just not there. Even
the origin of many RIF in zoos is not
known"
— RAHUL
KAUL, Regional
Coordinator
(South Asia), World Pheasant
Association |
Meanwhile, in the
us, companies are already making headway in genetically
modifying chicken to suit market demands. Many are
worried that this may further threaten the purity of the
original fowl (see box: Fowl
play).
Fowl play
Modifying chicken to suit the palate. Is it
safe?
Breast meat is a delicacy in USA. So much so
that a company called Avigenics has decided to
genetically modify chicken into one that can give
the country’s citizens more breast meat per palate
and plate. Or to derive some medical benefit for
the pharmaceutical industry. That’s not all. It is
also thinking of copyrighting the DNA tag to
prevent anyone from using the same technology.
This they plan to do by introducing a unique DNA
sequence into the ‘new’ chicken gene.
Chicken are injected with human genes to
produce human proteins like insulin in their egg
whites (albumen). The roosters ‘created’ by
Avigenics have reportedly passed on a substance
called ‘alpha interferon’ to new generations of
chicken. Alpha interferon is used to treat
Hepatitis and some malignancies. The same
technology will be used to create chicken for
daily human consumption. Genes will be added or
removed from the chicken to yield better breast
muscles or greater resistance to diseases. The
company is also planning to make their new
transgenic chicken available to poultry breeders
as well.
Concerns have been raised about the dangers of
making genetically modified (GM) chicken. It is
reported that GM fish — the first modified animal
life meant for human consumption — are breeding
along with their natural counterparts. This is
threatening the population of the natural ones as
well as their purity. Similar things are feared
with GM chicken. Those involved in the GM chicken
experiment, however, argue that years of selective
crossbreeding have created chicken totally
different from their ancestors
anyway. |
MORE...
Why save the rooster?
Poultry mess
Blacked
Out
For the rest of the article
please refer to the printed copy of
Down To Earth
December 15, 2000 or SUBSCRIBE
HERE.
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