vituperation

Anyone who’s been reading me for the last year or so knows how I feel about Cornish X chickens. They’re the foundation of the commercial chicken industry, and bred specifically to do nothing but eat and grow huge quickly. Cornish X chickens are numbers to the commercial guys: efficiency of feed conversion, feed costs, and survivability to market. Those guys want the maximum weight from the minimum investment, and the Cornish X delivers in spades.

They grow so fast, their bodies outstrip its own ability to keep up — their legs break under the immense weight, their feathering is gapped by ever-increasing girth, and they have heart attacks because their hearts get overworked. They have trouble walking, often spending their days at the feed. I’ve heard horror stories about home-raised Cornish X chickens dying of dehydration because they wouldn’t waddle the 10 feet to the waterer.

They’re ugly chickens, usually dirty because all they do is sit in one spot and feed. They have terrible issues with pasty butt as chicks, because there is an almost-constant stream of shit (mostly undigested feed in a pale brown slurry, very unlike normal gray-with-a-white-cap chicken poop) pouring out of them. I’ve read that they pant, because their lungs are underdeveloped for their bodies.

They’re destined to a short life, because generally they can’t have a long one without withholding their food for 12 hours a day. Even then there are no guarantees; these chickens can reach 20 pounds, mostly gargantuan breasts so big one person can’t eat one at a single sitting. Those breasts are what make them so unbalanced.

I tell you all this not to make you hate the Cornish X, but to pity it. I understand there is a need to fill the demand Americans have for cheap and plentiful chickens. These birds deliver. But…we don’t want to be part of that, so we raise normal chickens, and eat them smaller and older than the Cornish X. Eat them tastier, too — I think perhaps that growth speed and unvaried diet lends itself to some bland meat.

We apparently got four (or six, now I can’t remember) of these chickens with our batch of McMurray chicks two weeks ago. I don’t want Cornish X chickens, and they weren’t in the list of breeds supposedly in our order, but I can’t find any other chicks in the listed breeds that look like these guys. At two weeks, they dwarf all the other chicks, and all the other chicks are large, heavy breeds.

These little white balls of fuzz have grown so fast you can see their skin through the down and feathers. They reel around the brooder, lurching and stumbling into the other chicks, falling all the time. Cleaning butts is a regular thing, as mentioned before. The thing that really clinches that they’re Cornish X, though, is the legs. They’re short, stumpy, and as thick as my pinky.

And these chicks are two weeks old.

Here’s what they look like next to a normal-sized chick. These guys were born on the same day.

I have to say that if these are Cornish X, I’m a little disappointed in McMurray. First they sent us diseased chicks and shorted us four chicks in that order, and now this. Don’t get me wrong — they make it right with refunds, and I seem to be the only person who’s had problems with them, but still. Disappointing.