In your opinion, what is, or has been, the most useful animal on the planet?

Yummy, indeed. I'm just about to eat pig. Not the whole pig, you understand, but a little bit of it. 

Chickens aren't flightless.  Not completely anyway.

I believe that chickens used to fly like eagles but the modern crop were all bred from a rooster with acrophobia. They're just too frightened to fly. This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at April 1, 2017 10:06 PM MDT

Nah jungle fowl can fly short distances and glide into trees.  Chickens do the same thing if their wings aren't clipped. 

I'm still hanging on to the acrophobia idea. 

Interesting choice. I guess Moses couldn't have led his people to a land flowing with milk and hone if there had been no bees. But, as Golda Meir pointed out, he failed to take them anywhere that had oil. 

Bees, by pollination, are responsible for about a third of all the food we eat. Bees are disappearing and that is becoming a huge problem to where they have to get workers to manually pollinate crops in Florida. No bees, no pollination, no crops, no feed, no chickens.

No chickens!?

)

I hadn't thought of that. You're right, of course.

We'd all have to use goat's milk.

I knew I liked you, Pearl. I'll vote for dogs, too. 

A grazing machine that can fill in as a lawn mower, at need.

You got it. Making sheep more useful than pigs, and without the greenhouse inducing methane output of cows. 

You're right on all counts. Eating horse flesh has an uneasy feel to most of us but if it was us or Dobbin, we'd eat him. :)