It is not only the potentially lethal bug campylobacter in UK supermarket chickens that we have to worry about. If poultry keep growing at their current rate then they could soon be as big as us
Eight out of ten fresh chickens in UK supermarkets are contaminated with the potentially lethal food-poisoning bug campylobacter.
Inspired by the Economist, which calculated that turkeys will be big as humans in just 150 years, we wanted to find out if we were going to have to contend with massive chickens as well as infectious ones.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Alberta raised a 2005 commercial Ross 308 strain of chicken in the US as well as birds from strains existing in 1957 and 1978. The 1957 bird weighed in at 0.9kg while the one from 2005 was over 4kg. For reference, the size of the bird had quadrupled in the same period that the size of turkeys doubled.
All of this assuming that you can extrapolate in the way we have (you can't).
But it does lead us to ask, would you rather fight a human sized chicken or 100 chicken sized humans?
There may be no need for chicken costumes when there are human sized chickens wandering around. Photograph: Alamy