The aseel thread!!!

[ElleEmie]

My aseel x Liege cross will pull my shorts down from behind to demand feed. I don’t know if that’s intelligence or not but it is personality.

Looks like this, except the kid is a fat middle aged man and the dog is a weird looking rooster.

View attachment 3447621

My Asian fowl will do the same. He also will bang on my front screen door wanting feed…

 

[Rosto]

Amazing examples! I guess Aseel are kind of the Lassie dogs of the chicken world. You know one of them would go get help if Timmy fell down a well.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34031

This discussion about aseel intelligence got me thinking about brain size differences between domestic chickens and wild junglefowl. In most domesticated animals, domestication seems to correlate with smaller brain sizes than those of their wild counterparts. In chickens, it is the opposite.

 

[Red Mangrove]

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34031

This discussion about aseel intelligence got me thinking about brain size differences between domestic chickens and wild junglefowl. In most domesticated animals, domestication seems to correlate with smaller brain sizes than those of their wild counterparts. In chickens, it is the opposite.

Domestication is the retention of neotenous traits into adulthood. From my observation so far, all domesticated animals are weaker and less intelligent than their wild counterparts

It's odd to hear the opposite with your chickens. Perhaps you simply don't have the wild and domesticated side by side for neutral comparison

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Domestication is the retention of neotenous traits into adulthood. From my observation so far, all domesticated animals are weaker and less intelligent than their wild counterparts

It's odd to hear the opposite with your chickens. Perhaps you simply don't have the wild and domesticated side by side for neutral comparison

Its not “my” chickens, the scientific study I linked indicates that domestic chickens as a whole have larger brains than wild red junglefowl per the scientific data.

 

[Bigtom Turkey]

Kinda makes you wonder if there is a different genetic component. Like some kind of extinct junglefowl.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

Kinda makes you wonder if there is a different genetic component. Like some kind of extinct junglefowl.

That’s where my mind always goes when contemplating oriental gamefowl. Are they really just highly modified red junglefowl? Or do they represent another Gallus line? They look and act like they’re something different, except that they speak the same language as all chickens. I have considered that perhaps the bankivoid game drive actually comes from the oriental side and that the two have been crossed so many times over the millennia that it is no longe possible to correctly discern genetic lineage. It seems like its common for bankivoid groups to have oriental infused into them once a century or so on a wide scale and then buried back into the bankivoid genetics. As if the bankivoid lines need the oriental infusion every several chicken genetations to keep up their drive and physique.

Now my speculation aside, the current stance of geneticists is that orientals are just modified RJF with a few other known Gallus lines mixed in, and that some orientals are actually genetically closer to wild RJF than other chicken groups. Taking that at face value, I have wondered if the first orientals were the earliest junglefowl hybrids. I have seen some hybrids have oriental-like traits in terms of head and neck.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

The bekisar would be an example of a hybrid junglefowl that shows some oriental gamefowl-like traits.

 

[Rosto]

Very Interesting! I wonder what else could be learned from having a DNA bank of Oriental pedigrees. Like hunters do with hounds. I bet it would show even more interesting things about intelligence, brain development, and who knows what else.

 

[Bigtom Turkey]

They could just be VERY inbred junglefowl. Looking at the parrot-beaked asils. They are a more extreme oriental. One could then assume that inbreeding for years and years like many oriental breeders do, would create the bird we have now. And just crossing with other Gallus strains would add to that.