Chicken Wikipedia

Females (mature hens and younger chickens, called pullets) are raised for meat and for their edible eggs. In domesticating the chicken, humans took advantage of the red junglefowl’s ability to reproduce prolifically when exposed to a surge in its food supply. Specialized breeds such as broilers and laying hens have been developed for meat and egg production, respectively. The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a domesticated form of the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus), originally native to Southeast Asia. The chicken is perhaps the most widely domesticated fowl, raised worldwide for its meat and eggs.

Chicken Recipes

Some breeds have a mutation that causes extra feathering under the face, giving the appearance of a beard. Modern varieties however grow much faster; by day 35 a Ross 708 broiler may weigh 1.8 kg (4.0 lb) as against the 1.05 kg (2.3 lb) of a heritage chicken of the same age. Newly hatched chicks of both modern and heritage varieties weigh the same, about 37 g (1.3 oz). While the origin is Germanic, it is unclear exactly where the word came from, although it could ultimately have come from an imitation of the sound a chicken makes. The word chicken comes from Old English cicen (pronounced essentially the same as in Modern English).

In the United States alone, more than 8 billion chickens are slaughtered each year for meat, and more than 300 million chickens are reared for egg production. More than 50 billion chickens are reared annually as a source of meat and eggs. These domesticated chickens spread across Southeast and South Asia where they interbred with local wild species of junglefowl, forming genetically and geographically distinct groups. It is estimated that chickens share between 71 and 79% of their genome with red junglefowl. Domesticated chickens freely interbreed with populations of red junglefowl.

• Many people obtain chickens for their egg production but often name them and treat them as any other pet like cats or dogs.
• In situations where one adult bird challenges another—which happens most often when a new bird is introduced into the flock—fights involving males risk injury and death more often than fights involving females.
• Budget, ethics and taste all come into the equation but what almost all chefs, cooks and food writers agree on is that a good-quality, free-range bird is vastly superior in flavour to a cheap factory-farmed bird.
• Inbreeding of White Leghorn chickens tends to cause inbreeding depression expressed as reduced egg number and delayed sexual maturity.

Cheats rotisserie chicken with roast potatoes and corn on the cobs

Chicken, (Gallus gallus), any of more than 60 breeds of medium-sized poultry that are primarily descended from the wild red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes) of India. In the UK and Europe, laying hens are then slaughtered and used in processed foods, or sold as ‘soup hens’. Hens of some breeds can produce over 300 eggs per year; the highest authenticated rate of egg-laying is 371 eggs in 364 days. An early study proposed that a single domestication event of the red junglefowl in present-day Thailand gave rise to the modern chicken. The red junglefowl is well adapted to take advantage of the vast quantities of seed produced during the end of the multi-decade bamboo seeding cycle, to boost its own reproduction. The domestic chicken has subsequently hybridised with grey junglefowl, Sri Lankan junglefowl and green junglefowl; a gene for yellow skin, for instance, was incorporated into domestic birds from the grey junglefowl (G. sonneratii).

Chickens are descended primarily from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) and are scientifically classified as the same species. https://jaya9betting.com/bn/bonuses/ Under natural conditions, most birds lay only until a clutch is complete; they then incubate all the eggs. Many immature males (cockerels) are castrated (usually chemically, with hormones that cause atrophying of the testicles) to become meat birds (capons). Subsequent ovulations may occur within an hour after the previous egg was laid, allowing some hens to produce as many as 300 eggs per year. Egg laying is stimulated by the long stretches of daylight that occur during the warmer months; however, artificial lights placed in chicken coops can trigger a hen’s egg laying response throughout the year.

Chickens have been featured in art in farmyard scenes such as Adriaen van Utrecht’s 1646 Turkeys and Chickens and Walter Osborne’s 1885 Feeding the Chickens. The pseudo-riddle “Why did the chicken cross the road?” dates to 1847, or earlier. This involves the sacrifice of a sacred rooster, often during a ritual cockfight, used as a form of communication with the gods.

In 2006, scientists researching the ancestry of birds switched on a chicken recessive gene, talpid2, and found that the embryo jaws initiated formation of teeth, like those found in ancient bird fossils. In the process of domestication, chickens were apparently kept initially for cockfighting, and only later used for food. This stimulates the hen to lose her feathers but also re-invigorates egg-production. In some other countries, flocks are sometimes force-moulted rather than being slaughtered to re-invigorate egg-laying. After 12 months of laying, the commercial hen’s egg-laying ability declines to the point where the flock is commercially unviable. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 74% of the world’s poultry meat and 68% of eggs are produced this way.

Skeletons of birds in the Gallus genus were used as grave goods at the site, confirming domestication. Genomic studies estimated that the chicken was domesticated 8,000 years ago in Southeast Asia and spread to China and India 2,000 to 3,000 years later. The chicks imprint on the hen and subsequently follow her continually. Eggs of chickens from the high-altitude region of Tibet have special physiological adaptations that result in a higher hatching rate in low oxygen environments. A flock thus uses only a few preferred locations, rather than having a different nest for every bird. Hens often try to lay in nests that already contain eggs and sometimes move eggs from neighbouring nests into their own.

Strongly inbred Langshan chickens display obvious inbreeding depression in reproduction, particularly for traits such as age when the first egg is laid and egg number. Only hens that could no longer produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat. Only in the early 20th century, however, did chicken meat and eggs become mass-production commodities.