page_title: Domestication
section_title: Birds
hierarchical_section_title: Domestication / Animals / Birds
caption_attribution_description: English: Red Junglefowl at Kaeng Krachan National Park, Thailand.
context_page_description: Domestication is a sustained multi-generational relationship in which one group of organisms assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another group to secure a more predictable supply of resources from that second group.
  Charles Darwin recognized the small number of traits that made domestic species different from their wild ancestors. He was also the first to recognize the difference between conscious selective breeding in which humans directly select for desirable traits, and unconscious selection where traits evolve as a by-product of natural selection or from selection on other traits. There is a genetic difference between domestic and wild populations. There is also such a difference between the domestication traits that researchers believe to have been essential at the early stages of domestication, and the improvement traits that have appeared since the split between wild and domestic populations.
context_section_description: Domesticated birds principally mean poultry, raised for meat and eggs: some Galliformes (chicken, turkey, guineafowl) and Anseriformes (waterfowl: duck, goose, swan). Also widely domesticated are cagebirds such as songbirds and parrots; these are kept both for pleasure and for use in research.
  The domestic pigeon has been used both for food and as a means of communication between far-flung places through the exploitation of the pigeon's homing instinct; research suggests it was domesticated as early as 10,000 years ago.
  Chickens were domesticated at least 7,000 years ago, with fossils in China from c. 5400 BCE. The chicken's wild ancestor is Gallus gallus, the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. It appears to have been kept initially for cockfighting rather than for food.
caption: The red junglefowl of Southeast Asia was domesticated, apparently for cockfighting, some 7,000 years ago.
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