Naked Neck Chicken

Naked Neck Chicken, also called the Transylvanian Naked Neck and popularly nicknamed the Turken from a mistaken old belief that it was a chicken-turkey hybrid, is a breed most likely originating in Asia, where similar birds appear in old Japanese artwork and were historically bred for cockfighting, before becoming established in Transylvania, now part of Romania, by the late nineteenth century and further refined in Germany. The breed's defining trait, a bare, largely featherless neck and vent, is controlled by an incompletely dominant gene on chromosome 3, so a bird carrying even one copy shows reduced neck feathering while a true breeding bird carries two copies. Research has shown the naked-neck trait improves heat tolerance and, in warm-climate meat production, is associated with better feed conversion, larger breast size and improved carcass traits, along with a practical advantage that a naked-necked bird needs less plucking and yields a meatier looking carcass. The breed remains fairly common in Europe and very common in parts of South America as a utility meat and egg bird, though it stays rare in North America.