Chicken and the egg.

There are so many things that we accept at face value Just because we have been fed a story.

Growing up we are given a dumbed-down story of the "birds and the bees" and it satisfies our childish curiosity for a while.

When the evidence against those stories becomes overwhelming we go back to reassess what we "know" to be true.

This goes through many iterations until we arrive at the "truth".

Today I thought about one such story and realised that as we grow we upgrade our framework through the eyes of an adult.

I realised is that there may remain traces of stories that we don't question even though we should.

We have been told that chickens lay eggs, daily.

When that egg is fertilised, it results in a chick hatching, but for the most part, the eggs are not fertilised and are sterile, and yummy.

The egg contains nutrients, enough to feed a human family yet the chicken creates them daily, after spending its entire day foraging for the calories to build tomorrow's egg.

This suits humans fine and we harvest the freshly laid eggs daily.

If we did not, the chicken would, what, sit on the egg until it didn't hatch then it would kick it to the curb?

At an egg a day the chicken would in the wild mean incubating thirty eggs every month?
Three hundred and sixty-five in a year.? Then what?

This story sounds fishy.

On the face of it, it looks like we are missing something crucial here.

Other birds don't produce and lay eggs daily, regardless of whether they are fertilised or not.

So what up with the chicken?

I suspect that by some kind of selective breeding wizardry this odd behaviour was bred into existence.

Just to serve up our daily breakfast.

When I looked a little closer at the facts of the matter, what I uncovered was truly bizarre.

As with human females, every chicken is born with a finite number of eggs in her.

She is wired to lay eggs until they reach the optimal brood number. Roughly twelve.
Then she will stop laying and incubate the eggs till the fertilised ones hatch.

We, humans, are able to simulate the weather and light conditions so the chicken is forced to lay eggs.

We take away each egg as soon as it is laid, so the chicken never reaches the magic number to make a brood.

So she fires off an egg every day until her ovaries are barren.

Then she is an old maid and only valuable for her meat.

A lifetimes supply of eggs fired off in one go.

The entire business seems so deceitful and cruel, yet not enough to make me give up Eggs Benedict with sausages.

Don't get me started on cows milk.

𝓜 𝓟𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓴
Feb 2022.

Ps. I came across an article online that touched on this topic and I was initially so elated to know that I was not the only person to have had this thought. Then I read the article completely and then went on to read the comments and I realised that they were lookin down the wrong end of the barrel. They were focused on how modern technology has increased the yeild and how it comes at the cost of less nutritious eggs. Nobody cared about about this from the hens perspective.