Cochin Chicken

Cochin is a large, heavily feathered chicken breed that reached the West from China in the 1840s and 1850s, imported through the Indian port of Cochin, from which it took its name despite originating in China rather than India. Its most distinctive feature is a dense covering of soft, fluffy feathers extending down the legs and over the feet, giving the bird a rounded, almost spherical silhouette unlike the leaner build of most chicken breeds. The breed's arrival in Britain and the United States in the mid nineteenth century, including birds gifted to Queen Victoria, helped spark the Victorian Hen Fever craze for large Asiatic fowl alongside the Brahma. Cochin is a poor layer and slow to mature compared with commercial breeds, so it is kept today almost entirely for exhibition and as an ornamental backyard bird, and it has also served as foundation stock in developing several bantam breeds.