I understand that people also eat quail eggs, goat milk or etc etc due to geography (?) – but at what point and why did many settle on chicken eggs and cow milk?
Thank you
ETA: WOOAAAAAAH a great deal of responses here. thank you!!!!
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Goats can eat any kind of vegetation, but if you have access to quality pastureland with lots of grass, or artificial feed, cattle are much more productive. Cows are big. That makes them difficult to handle at times, but there are fewer animals to milk and provide vet care for. Beef and cow leather are much more highly valued than those products from goats.
Chickens are ridiculously productive and well adapted to confined spaces. Domestic ducks lay nearly as many eggs, it is possible that they could be bred to be as tolerant of confinement as chickens. But ducks need water to clean themselves, while chickens clean their feathers with dry soil. In modern times it is possible to keep ducks indoors and use pesticides to kill feather mites, but chickens have more improved breeding because that wasn’t possible in the past.
I don’t know why cows, but I know why chicken eggs are standard. Chickens are descended from red junglefowl. In the forests where red junglefowl originated, occasionally all the bamboo would drop edible seeds at once. So red junglefowl evolved to run their reproductive systems really excessively fast when there’s a lot of food around, to take maximum advantage of the bamboo seed crops. If you have a chicken and you feed it a lot, it’ll lay a lot of eggs because its biology thinks the bamboo seed crop just came in, and that means a lot of eggs for your kitchen.
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Yield. Many other animals produce milk and eggs, but we have discovered cows that can produce more and are easy enough to rear. Same for eggs, egg hens may lay eggs daily while geese pretty much only lay a couple of eggs in spring.
We have lots of good land for cows, and cows produce a lot of milk. Go to someplace like Greece and you get mainly goat and sheep milk, animals that love the rocky, hilly terrain that cows don’t do well on.
Availability for domesticating chickens. Cows are easily herded. Though in some countries, duck eggs are more preferred
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