I’m glad I’m not a chicken.
If I was, and I was a lucky chicken, I would be happy growing up in a free range country lifestyle, scratching out the day in dust baths under the sun and roosting in a tree with my mates for the night.
Your goose is cooked
I would spare a thought for the 50 billion or so other farmed chooks worldwide who sometimes never see the light of day and have a life expectancy of only six weeks before being beheaded, filleted, roasted, fried and engorged by most of the worlds’ hungry seven billion bellies.
Needing only two kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of chicken (compared to eight kilograms of feed for cattle) and taking only six weeks to mature, they are an efficient and cost effective food source for the billions.
But I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for some of the conditions most of these community orientated curious cluckers are forced to live and die in.
Chickens one day, feathers the next!
To be scared of chickens is to be Alektorophobic; although I am sure this next little condemned chook is experiencing a case of Ophidiophobia – the fear of snakes – as it looks like he is next on the menu when the dozing python behind him wakes up. I would be chickening out too.
It’s not all doom and gloom; some fortunate flocks rise to fame in such movies as Chicken Run and my favourite chicken of them all – Chicken Joe in Surf’s Up (a must-see) which hopefully keeps their nuggets out of a bucket of KFC for a little bit longer.
Some Interesting Chicken Facts:
- A chickens’ heart beats 280 to 315 times a minute.
- Domesticated over 8,000 years ago, probably in Vietnam.
- The mighty chicken is the closest living relative to a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
- Chickens have more bones in their neck than giraffes.
- Chickens experience rapid eye movement (REM); what do chickens dream about?
- Fear of chickens: Alektorophobic
- Fear of snakes: Ophidiophobia
Kuala Lumpur market: the unfortunate life and death of a chicken
About Imogen Throp