I love the day after Thanksgiving... it's like a gift -a totally free day on which we can suffer the indignities of the mall or spend time on things we would never otherwise do., like researching the chicken populations of the US and China.
While reading a blurb in Time Magazine, quoting Zhou Liwei, a provincial spokesman of Liaoning, China, I noticed that Time was saying that China has a chicken population of 5.2 billion. It struck me that - given the human population of China - this was not an extremely large number of chickens. So, I delved a bit into USDA data (2004 domestic US chicken and broiler production and global broiler statistics) and came up with some numbers that I think are pretty amazing...
| Country | People | Chickens | Ratio |
| China | 1,300,000,000 | 5,843,394,740 | 4.49 |
| US | 296,000,000 | 8,934,000,000 | 30.18 |
This means that - in China - there are 4.49 chickens in every pot. In the US, there are 30.18 chickens in every pot (assuming that every man, woman and child has a pot)!
Puts a new perspective on things, doesn't it? I mean - abstract statistics about hunger and all of that are pretty boring... but when you think about the implications of each person in the US being represented by 30 chickens - versus only 4 in China - it is pretty mind-boggling.
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