Chickens get no respect. Ask any chicken researcher.

When the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain decided to give about $3 million to a number of academic figures, including Greger Larson, to study the “Cultural & Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions,” the grant caught the eye of someone at The Daily Mail, in England.

“A Birdbrained Idea?”, read the headline over an article that contrasted cuts in entirely unrelated social services with what was portrayed as a silly windfall of chicken money.

Dr. Larson, a professor at Oxford, who is also overseeing a major project on dog evolution, did not laugh.

As he noted recently, the staggering number of chickens in the world — 20 billion or so — is reason enough to study them. And although it may be hard to believe, it seems that neither potpie nor chicken Parmesan was the reason humans domesticated them.