Dorking Chicken

Dorking Chicken is an English breed named for the market town of Dorking in Surrey, from which birds were historically sent to London's poultry markets, and it is counted among the oldest British chicken breeds. Its most distinctive trait is five toes per foot instead of the usual four, and one long-standing account traces the breed to five-toed poultry associated with Roman Britain, referencing the Roman writer Columella's praise for five-toed fowl, though historians note real uncertainty about how directly that Roman stock connects to the modern breed. Dorking was the principal meat breed supplying London markets until the early twentieth century, when the Sussex breed displaced it commercially, and it gained early recognition as exhibition poultry at the first poultry show held at the London Zoo in 1845. The breed came close to extinction around the Second World War, was revived through a dedicated breed club from 1970 onward, and is today classified by the FAO as endangered-maintained, kept mainly for exhibition and heritage conservation.