All the turkeys I’ve ever seen on farms (in real life, pictures, or video) are white. All the geese I’ve ever seen on farms are white. All the ducks I’ve ever seen on a farm are white. The majority of the chickens I’ve see on farms are white, too.
How can this be? Wild turkeys in my area are brown or black. The geese in my area are Canada Geese so they are mainly black with patterns of white. The ducks are almost all Mallards and brown for the females with more brightly coloured males. Can chickens even survive in the wild? The breeds from a century ago might but since they’ve been over bred to produce white meat, their chests have gotten huge and their legs have gotten tiny.
Are the farmers favouring white fowl for some reason? If Daffy Duck came along to some farm, might he be prodded away with a pitchfork and told “We don’t tolerate black ducks in these here parts”?
With the new science of epigenetics, traits caused by genes can be turned on and off for generations if given the right trigger. Perhaps this whiteness is a common gene in fowl that is triggered by farm life. Maybe the epigenetic trigger is one of: lack of exercise, confinement, the same feed day in and day out, or a lack of sunlight.
I live in North America. Maybe farm fowl were shipped over from Europe during colonization. Isn’t everything in Europe white?
Or maybe fowl know a thing or two about humans. Perhaps they are waving the only white flag they have – themselves. “We give up,” they are saying. “We want a truce. Have the land, just don’t eat us.”
