So I was talking to @UrOrientalist this morning and I was all "you know what we did not get into for @east_podcast? THE EGREGIOUS RACISM IN THE CHICKEN WORLD" because friends, let me tell you, there is so much fuckery afoot.

We did talk about the fuckery involved with Nubian goats! https://twitter.com/east_podcast/status/1253361040152289281?s=19

But let me tell you about chicken related fuckery both historical and recent, y'all. There is so much fuckery.

So we will start with the historical fuckery of the Sultan Chicken.
Behold the write up on the Livestock Conservancy's site:
https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/sultan

First off, whenever you see the words "legend has it" you know that we white people are about to commit some fuckery and this is no different.

What do we actually know here?

We know that one Elizabeth Watts in Hampstead, UK, claimed to have received the original breeding stock from a friend living in Istanbul. We know the chickens have V combs and crests and feathered legs. We know they are supposedly called "serai taook" in Turkish.

First off, googling "serai taook" gets you a shit ton of pages in English telling you that Turkish people call this chicken that. It gets you zero pages in Turkish talking about this chicken.

It does get you pages in Turkish that, judging from the pics, are kebab recipes.

Secondly, the V comb is not a common shape in chickens. The other breeds that have it are the Crevecouer, Houdan, and La Fleche, all originating in France; and the Polish chicken, which originates in the Netherlands.

That tells us the mutation required for that comb shape was western European and fairly narrowly confined geographically.

The Sultan's feathered legs are a phenotype common to the Belgium/Netherlands area since roughly the 1500s but NOT commonly seen in West Asian chicken breeds or landraces.

So do I have proof that Mrs Watts lied about the origins of the chickens she acquired? I do not. Possibly someone lied to her. Possibly I'm entirely wrong and someone from Turkish twitter will tell me the country is swarming with these birds and they do call them serai taook!

But I do know that white people have an egregious history of exoticizing and othering West Asia, and that the phenotypical features of the Sultan are found in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands rather than, yknow, Turkey.

The balance of probability is that these are chickens of western European ancestry about which SOMEONE lied to make them sound more exciting than "hey look what I found in a French barnyard".

Join me later today for STOP COLUMBUSING CHICKENS FROM EAST ASIA, GREENFIRE FARMS but I gotta use some soap on me and eat some breakfast.