The mass of the 23 billion chickens alive at any given moment is greater than that of all the other birds on Earth combined. We are living in the age of the chicken. One of the geological markers of the Anthropocene is expected to be the copious amounts of chicken bones left behind in the fossil record. ‘The signal of our civilisation is already being recorded,’ says Carys Bennett, a geographer at Leicester University, ‘and that signal is the modern chicken.’
