Cornish Chicken

Cornish Chicken, originally called Indian Game, is an English breed developed in Cornwall and Devon in the early nineteenth century, credited to Sir Walter Gilbert of Bodmin around 1820, who bred it intending a fighting cock but found it had no real aptitude for cockfighting and redirected it toward meat production instead. It is a large, stocky, short legged bird, unusually broad and deep through the breast, with standard males weighing around 3.6 kilograms and hens around 2.7 kilograms, though very broad breasted individuals can struggle to reproduce naturally; hens lay a modest number of light brown eggs, roughly 80 a year. The breed was renamed Cornish Indian Game in the United States in 1905 and simply Cornish by 1910, and the American-developed White Cornish variety became foundational to the modern commercial broiler industry, used worldwide for crossbreeding to produce fast-growing hybrid meat chickens and game hens. As a native British breed it now holds priority conservation status on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust watchlist.