What are meat birds

[EveLa]

The Cornish X meat chicken is a multi-line hybrid developed over decades to produce the most possible meat in the shortest possible time with the greatest possible feed conversion efficiency.

Any chicken can be raised and eaten for meat, but some turn feed into meat more effectively than others and no animal in the history of the earth has ever done that better than the modern Cornish X.

There are other common meat birds, noteably the assorted "Rangers" or "Colored Broilers", which have been bred with more emphasis on suitability to pastured conditions. They take longer and consume more feed in reaching the same butchering weight, but some prefer them because they suit either their philosophy of chicken keeping or their management system better than the Cornish X do.

Thank you for the info !!

 

[Pye Wacket]

The Cornish X meat chicken is a multi-line hybrid developed over decades to produce the most possible meat in the shortest possible time with the greatest possible feed conversion efficiency.

Any chicken can be raised and eaten for meat, but some turn feed into meat more effectively than others and no animal in the history of the earth has ever done that better than the modern Cornish X.

There are other common meat birds, noteably the assorted "Rangers" or "Colored Broilers", which have been bred with more emphasis on suitability to pastured conditions. They take longer and consume more feed in reaching the same butchering weight, but some prefer them because they suit either their philosophy of chicken keeping or their management system better than the Cornish X do.

Or because they TASTE BETTER. Don't get me wrong, I'll eat grocery store chicken and given I've been coopless for decades I would otherwise not be eating any chicken at all.

But more than once I've bit into something sort of lumpish and pale and not been sure if that was a piece of chicken or a piece of tofu (I make my own and press it, my tofu is VERY firm).

I mean they just have very little flavor, and for all that I'm too squeamish to eat drumsticks or wings, nowadays you can barely tell thigh meat from breast meat. Sometimes you can't, or at least *I* can't. And the drumsticks are not the drumsticks of yesteryear with big strong tendons and huge veins. They're much toned down from old timey chicken drumsticks. If I weren't already suffering from drumstick PTSD, a modern triple-cross drumstick wouldn't faze me at all. The wings have also become a bit problematic for me. They're so HUGE!

 

[Egghead_Jr]

Birds will slow down to stop laying when dealing with new location and flock integration. Then you've got young birds that may not have come into lay yet and year old birds that may still be finishing up molt. You're just looking at time before you see the eggs pouring in.