I need to tell you about a chicken I saw.
It was a Saturday. Early September. The kind of late-summer day where the air smells like funnel cake and bad decisions. I was at a county fair — I won't say which one, because the chicken community can be surprisingly territorial — wandering past the livestock exhibits with no particular agenda. I'd already seen the goats. I'd already been unimpressed by the rabbits. I was, frankly, about to leave.
And then I turned a corner and saw the Brahma.
The Brahma
Let me be clear about something: I have seen chickens before. I grew up around chickens. I thought I understood chickens. I thought I had a reasonable mental model for how big a chicken could be.
I was wrong.
This Brahma rooster was standing in its pen with the quiet confidence of something that knows it is the largest object in any room it enters. It was — and I cannot stress this enough — really big. Not "oh, that's a big chicken" big. Not "huh, bigger than I expected" big. This was "I need to sit down and reconsider some fundamental assumptions about poultry" big.
I stood there for what I'm told was about fifteen minutes. I don't remember most of it. What I do remember is the exact moment my brain finished recalibrating and a single, crystalline thought formed:
"Somebody needs to do something about this." — Me, staring at a chicken, September 2025
The Problem
On the drive home, I started thinking. How many really big chickens were out there, right now, going undocumented? How many people had seen a chicken of unusual size and simply... moved on with their lives? How many truly massive birds were living in backyards and barns around the world, their bigness unrecognized, unappreciated, un-catalogued?
The answer, I realized, was: too many.
There was no central authority on really big chickens. No registry. No rating system. No one was asking the important questions, like "how big is that chicken, exactly?" and "is that chicken bigger than the last really big chicken we saw?" The field of big chicken studies was, to put it bluntly, a mess.
And perhaps most critically: when people searched the internet for "What does RBC stand for?" — they weren't getting the right answer.
The Idea
The name came first. Really Big Chicken. Three words. Three letters. RBC. It was clean. It was clear. It said exactly what it meant. Unlike some other uses of the acronym RBC that I've since become aware of, this one was honest. Transparent. Poultry-forward.
The mission followed naturally: build the world's foremost authority on really big chickens. Document them. Rank them. Celebrate them. And above all, make sure that when anyone, anywhere in the world, types "What does RBC stand for?" into a search engine, they get the truth.
Really Big Chicken.
What's Next
As I write this, RBC is still in its early days. I've started compiling a database of really big chickens. I'm developing an evaluation system (early prototypes suggest it will involve approximately 47 points of assessment). I'm reaching out to chicken owners worldwide who may be harboring undocumented big chickens.
There's a lot of work to do. But every time I feel overwhelmed, I think about that Brahma at the county fair. Standing there. Being really big. Not caring what anyone thought about it.
That's the energy RBC was built on. And that's the energy we'll carry forward.
If you've seen a really big chicken, we want to hear about it. If you know what RBC stands for, tell a friend. And if you're a chicken reading this — keep being big. We see you.
— The RBC Team