ducks
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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Take their closest relative and breed them back into existence.
Chickens are now eight feet tall and carnivorous. What are we doing now?
Oven bags.
Teach them the metric system, I guess.
Using frog DNA should help a lot!
I don't see how this could possibly go wrong.
The answer depends on a lot of factors such as the timing of the extinction and the factors that lead to the extinction of chickens.
Being such a ubiquitous food source for humans provides a fair amount of insurance against their extinction, so long as humans themselves have not also gone extinct (which we can rule out in your "what are we doing next" scenario), which suggests that something truly catastrophic has happened or that something has fundamentally changed about the human condition (possibly in conjunction with something catastrophic).
So, I think one scenario to consider is that chickens become irrelevant and unimportant to us. If we're no longer consuming chickens, we're no longer mass producing them to astronomical population levels. At best we would keep a drastically smaller population for pets, pest control, and things of that nature. But over time, if interest fails, their populations might dwindle to the point where other issues like genetic bottlenecks or a virulent disease wipes them out. This could be finalized if, for instance, global climate disaster wipes out their feral populations and populations of their ancestral species.
As for reasons why they might become irrelevant in the first place, perhaps we reach a point where manufactured protein sources (ala lab grown meat) become more substantially more economically or environmentally viable compared to chicken, as a whole we adapt a vegan diet, or our preferences adjust towards animal proteins from more efficient sources like insects.
I’m going to have you write a screenplay around this. I want it on my desk by close of business Monday.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. A hundred years since the final bock, bock, bagock chimed upon these lands. A sound lost to silence and the limits of generational human experience. Stories told of things called chicken nuggets echoed hollow on the ears of today's people unable to grasp the former ubiquity of the chicken fillet sandwich and cock-a-doodle-doos of a time long erased from our collective memories. Scientists too preoccupied with whether or not they could to consider whether or not they should synthesize our food in a lab, and now we all pay the bill, no concept of what we have lost.
Probably breeding turkeys to taste more chicken-like
Chk'n
Why’all looking at me? OH! Oh no…
Goats, probably.
No problem, I'm sure humanity will find another animal to kill off.
Ironically, raising an animal for livestock is probably the best way to ensure a species' "survival".
One of the other ways for an animal is being cute.