Richard Collins: A new lease of life for chicken and egg debate

Up to 1.8m tall, with powerful legs and a lethal dagger-like nail on the innermost toe, cassowaries would prefer to be antelopes

A Southern cassowary on the beach where it was searching for food, berries mostly.

NOBODY knows how many domestic chickens there are. An estimate, based on the consumption of eggs and poultry worldwide, suggests that up to 26bn are alive at any time. Whatever the true figure, this descendent of the red jungle fowl, from the Indus Valley, is the world’s most successful bird.

Despite being slaughtered for the pot, your average domestic chicken lives a longer, and happier, life than any other bird. The lives of most wild creatures are, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.