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By Christmas 2150, we’ll be eating turkeys as big as us

By Christmas 2150, we’ll be eating turkeys as big as us

That is unless they haven’t taken over the country by then…

This startling statistic was brought to our attention by the Economist, which extrapolated official US department of agriculture data about the average weight of turkeys at slaughter.

Back in 1929 the average was around 6kg but by October of this year, the month before Thanksgiving, it had more than doubled to around 30.6kg.

We checked the figures in the UK and according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the average weight of a turkey upon slaughter in the UK in 2013/14 was 13.25kg.

By the Economist’s reckoning, if Turkeys continue growing at the same rate, within 150 years they will be as big as humans, and within a further 6,000 they’ll actually be bigger than the Earth itself.

Helpfully though the dramatic weight gain is attributable to selective breeding programmes, while Britons can console themselves with the fact the turkey population in the UK is only around million, compared to 250million in the US.

HT: The Economist

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