Читать книгу Birds For Dummies - Gina Spadafori - Страница 13

Our earliest ancestors didn’t have the luxury of enjoying birds as pets — they needed them for food, and they hunted birds and collected eggs to meet their most basic sustenance needs. Before long, though, humankind started to realize the benefits of domestication (changing wild creatures so that they not only provide us with food, but also serve as helpers and companions). These changes began 10,000 to 12,000 years ago and haven’t stopped since. The worldwide growth of fried-chicken fast-food chains is just a modern milestone on the road that began in the jungles of Asia, where people first discovered the tasty ancestor of domestic chickens, the red jungle fowl.

Domestic fowl were admired and worshipped for their fertility, their courage, and even their role as the earliest alarm clocks. With so much going for them, birds quickly graduated to a place of honor for their nonmeat attributes — their beauty became reason enough to keep them around.

Although many of the world’s cultures are horrified at the very idea of eating dogs and cats, the use of birds for food is nearly universally accepted (with the exception of individuals who abstain for philosophical or religious reasons). Why is it that some birds are prized as family members and others are best appreciated when served with orange sauce? We don’t know, but in Chapter 2 we show you how some of the birds we routinely consider “food” really have decent pet potential!