Dijitaliks News

Shearing off extraneous matter is how the featherless chicken was hatched. But ditching field events is too much plucking

You don’t hear much about the featherless chicken any more, which on reflection is probably for the best. The idea was simple enough: for poultry-rearing purposes feathers are a nuisance, bearing significant costs in labour and industrial plant, so by breeding genetically modified feather-free chickens you could save the industry billions. Just imagine if you could also convince the chicken to eat sage and onion stuffing. Perhaps even baste itself in lemon butter at regular intervals.

Alas, when it was unveiled in 2002 by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the featherless chicken failed to take flight for one simple reason: it looked freaky as hell. It turned out that the feather layer, while gastronomically extrinsic, provided vastly underrated context. Above all, people did not want to see their Sunday dinner walking around in front of them. “It’s a normal chicken,” pleaded the geneticist Avigdor Cahaner, “except for the fact it has no feathers.”