From beak to bum (2024)

FAQs

What came first, the chicken or the egg? ›

Chickens lay amniotic eggs, a trick they inherited from their reptilian ancestors. So that means that the egg came first, before the chicken!

The male fowl has two testes that are situated along its back. These never descend into an external scrotum, as do those of other farm animals. Some male chickens are "caponized" or castrated (surgical removal of the testes) to make them fatten more readily.

Chickens in the egg industry. Egg laying does not appear to be painful in and of itself. But hens in commercial systems are bred to be physically small and to produce large eggs, putting strain on their bodies as they lay, and putting them at risk for painful keel bone fractures.

According to food historians, humans have been eating eggs for about 6 million years, originally eating them raw from the nests of wild birds. Jungle birds were domesticated for egg production in India by 3200 BC, and it is thought that Ancient Egypt and Ancient China were the first societies to domesticate hens.

The chicken was primarily domesticated from red junglefowl, with subsequent genetic contributions from grey junglefowl, Sri Lankan junglefowl, and green junglefowl.

Cloaca: The cloaca is the only hole for the reproductive and digestive system of a chicken. The cloaca, also known as the vent, is where chickens poop from, where the eggs come out, and where they mate with a rooster. Yikes! This may bother some people when thinking about eating their eggs.

Rooster testicl*s cooked into a paprika-spiked stew, kakashere pörkölt, is another. This should come as no surprise, really. In a country where meat—be it beef, pork, turkey, or goose—is consumed with gusto, the rooster's family jewels are just another juicy delicacy served in a heady paprika broth.

'There's no way' this could happen, experts say

"This one looks like a hoax as a penny would have to be inserted into the Oviduct before the shell was formed," he explained to Yahoo News Australia.

When it comes to the emotional aspect, the simplest answer is “no.” Chickens do not possess the same complex range of emotions as humans do. In a scenario where eggs are collected regularly from a flock that lays eggs daily, the chickens do not feel any emotions – such as sadness – related to the removal of their eggs.

The first hypothesis is that the hen is just SO doggone proud of herself for laying that egg and SO relieved to have it plop out that she feels the need to broadcast that fact to the world. She is literally crowing with pride about her accomplishment.

What are gizzards made of? ›

So there you have it — a chicken gizzard is basically the stomach of the chicken. It's made of muscular walls that contract. The gizzard is aided by gritty, sand-like particles the chickens ingest as they peck that help to grind the food so that it may pass to the small intestine, where nutrients are absorbed.

The chicken digestive tract is like other monogastric (single stomach) animals, such as the pig, horse, and dog, but also has its own unique differences. The most notable include the lack of teeth, crop, proventriculus, ventriculus (aka gizzard), ceca, and cloaca.

Vent gleet is the common name given to a cloacal fungal infection caused by Candida albicans; it presents in a similar way to thrush. In general hens will continue to eat and drink normally. Vent gleet can be transmitted by a co*ckerel if kept with infected hens.

Back to our original question: with amniotic eggs showing up roughly 340 million or so years ago, and the first chickens evolving at around 58 thousand years ago at the earliest, it's a safe bet to say the egg came first.

Christian philosophers like Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas spent time considering how to square Greek philosophers' wonder and sage thinking with the certainty of their religious worldview, says Sorensen. After all, understanding the question based strictly on Genesis, the chicken would come first.

Egg wins. By a country mile. In fact, shelled eggs evolved in some (but not all) dinosaur groups, one of which was the ancestor of modern-day birds, about 160m years ago. Other dinosaur groups, including the earliest long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods, may have evolved shelled eggs 195 million years ago.

Plutarch posed the question as a philosophical matter in his essay "The Symposiacs", written in the 1st century CE.