" The chicken is a domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the Red Jungle Fowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, and with a population of more than 24 billion in 2003, there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, consuming both their meat and their eggs. Recent evidence suggests that domestication of the chicken was already under way in Thailand, Vietnam and the South East Asian jungles over 10,000 years ago, and spread into neighboring regions to the east such as China, and towards the west in India where it was conventionally thought to have been domesticated. " . . . Learn more from Wikipedia!