Last week, we addressed which came first, the chicken or the egg. Then we answered five other burning questions about the fowl. Our series concludes today with four more FAQs.
How come chickens lay so many eggs? It’s ridiculous.
Some birds lay a certain number of eggs at a time. These are “determinate” layers. Other birds, including the chicken, will keep laying eggs until they accumulate a satisfying nest’s-worth. They are “indeterminate” layers, and if you keep taking eggs away from them, they’ll keep laying more, forever dissatisfied. The more you take, the more they give. Still, it took modern breeding and lighting technology to get chickens to lay year-round. Hopefully chickens are as stupid as Werner Herzog says they are, or I imagine this situation would make for a rocky emotional life. [Image courtesy of Me, My Kid & Life.]
How many feathers does a chicken have?
Apparently, one man went to the trouble of counting all the feathers on a Plymouth Rock chicken. His result was 8325. No one seems to have bothered to verify this, which is fine.
I’m a Catholic and I’m confused: am I allowed to eat chicken on fast days?
In the 9th century, during Charlemagne’s campaign to standardize Christianity in his Holy Roman Empire, it was determined that chicken was too luxurious and delectable a meat to be eaten on fast days — and monks were disallowed from eating chicken ever, except during four days at Easter and four more at Christmas. In the 13th century things changed: Thomas Aquinas, all-star theologian, decided that chickens were of aquatic origin, and therefore could be eaten whenever it was okay to eat fish, which included fast days. The Church later reneged, and proscribed chicken once more. It just didn’t seem right: chicken tastes too good for days that are meant to be unpleasant. The real question here is what God thinks about the matter, and it turns out we’re just not sure.
Were roosters ever subject to unjust legal persecution?
Of course. To name just two examples:
Look up “sybarite” in your dictionary, and you might find a definition like this: “A person devoted to luxury or pleasure; an effeminate voluptuary or sensualist” (OED). In the beginning, though, Sybarites were real people who lived in the Greek city of Sybaris (in southern Italy) and were famous for dissolute living. In accordance with their reputation for lazy opulence, these Sybarites banished all roosters from their city, because roosters had the unpleasant tendency to crow in the morning and wake everyone up before they had slept off last night’s debauchery. This law was an early form of smashing the alarm clock, and I’m sure a number of renegade roosters were beaten or murdered by bleary-eyed sybarites.
Perhaps the most evocative case, however, comes from medieval Switzerland. In the little town of Basle, a rooster had committed one of the few crimes a rooster can commit: it laid an egg. Medieval peasants never took kindly to unexpected, seemingly unnatural behavior; but since these noble Swiss believed in the rule of law, they gave the rooster a fair trial. The prosecution accused the rooster of upsetting the natural order in an act of viscous sorcery. The defense (yes, the rooster had a lawyer) could not deny that the rooster had, indeed, laid an egg, but did contend that no compact with the devil was involved. It was just an accident. Nobody listened to what the rooster had to say. And in the end, predictably, the Swiss had no choice but to condemn the bird for sorcery and burn it alive.
Considering that you can hypnotize a chicken about as easily as you can slip on a bar of soap, I doubt this Swiss rooster practiced many dark arts. Better safe than sorry, though.
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“Considering that you can hypnotize a chicken about as easily as you can slip on a bar of soap”
Which leads to two more chicken questions:
1. How do you hypnotize a rooster?
2. If you have hypnotized people act like a chicken, do you have a hypnotized rooster act like a person?
posted by mmmatt on 2-16-2009 at 7:34 pm
I, too, am frequently unsatisfied. Perhaps someone is stealing my eggs? This is a topic that should be researched and blogged about: psychological egg theft.
posted by Adrienne on 2-16-2009 at 8:59 pm
you hypnotize a chicken by drawing a clearly visible vertical line, positioning the chicken at one end of the line, and facing one side of their head towards the line. this is also applicable for roosters.
posted by shane on 2-16-2009 at 10:19 pm
viscous sorcery?
posted by 8rustystaples on 2-17-2009 at 9:58 am
We picked up a couple of back-yard chickens last year (living firmly in suburbia). They make wonderful pets.
The kids love playing with them. While I would not say that they are not intensely intelligent, they are smarter than most barn mammals. They are much more curious than cats and are more quiet than dogs (provided that you have only hens).
It is astonishing how much better tasting fresh backyard eggs are than the store bought ones. Plus, they eat our table scraps, devour most of the bugs in our yard and do a good deal of the weeding as well.
On the down-side, they fertilize everywhere indiscriminately, so careful that you don’t step in the chicken poop.
posted by n2y2 on 2-17-2009 at 11:13 am
I sympathized with those roosters that were unjustly prosecuted. I had my fair share of shame of rooster cruelty.
My dad has a wide collection of birds and just fresh from med school where sleeping was a luxury, I went home expecting to indulge. But then we had this fat, huge boisterous rooster which started crowing at 4 am– just outside my bedroom window. This drove me crazy of course.
I spent all my waking days hatching a plan to assassinate the rooster. First, I used my baby bro’s toy gun with plastic pellets. The pellets just ‘pinged’ harmlessly on the cholesterol-laden bird. He barely noticed them. Then my sister’s husband carved me a Y-shaped slingshot (not your biblical David weaponry). It took me a short while to learn how to aim and shoot. using stones as bullets, I pelted the poor rooster to an inevitable death. He suffered from subdural hematoma, i guess, after i shot him on the head.
I wasn’t proud of what i did. But i did spend my post-rooster days in narcoleptic frenzy.
posted by grey on 2-17-2009 at 2:14 pm
Just had to comment to say that I loved this line: “The real question here is what God thinks about the matter, and it turns out we’re just not sure.”
posted by Orange on 2-17-2009 at 3:23 pm
Yikes, grey, what happened to “first do no harm”? :o
posted by NYCGirl on 2-18-2009 at 3:39 am
My great-granparents had chickens. My mom said she used to chase them. My great-granddad wasn’t too fond of them.
posted by Sara on 2-22-2009 at 11:00 am
Fun article!
I see my photo was used for the above article. Thanks give the recognition.
I knew that pic wasn’t going to be a turkey!
posted by Christine on 3-8-2009 at 1:35 am
ok, having both read the magazine article, and having access to chickens, I made it my mission to test the hypnotized chicken theory….
turns out.. Myth confirmed! i’m astonished.
the bedazzled barn fowl become entranced by circling a finger around their beak, and by stairing intently into their eyes (that last one was scary because I was sure I’d be pecked in the face)
nifty!
posted by Melanie on 3-29-2010 at 4:40 pm
n2y2, we’ve got some suburban chickens as well. They’ve actually started a trend in our neighborhood, and actracted a number of kids to the yard, who’ve since become good friends of mine and we hang out every other day or so in the backyard. :)
At most, each of our four chickens will lay one egg a day (and, rarely, two). When it gets colder, however, we only get eggs from the most consistent layers (which leaves us with 1-2 a day, and sometimes none). They do make lovely little animals, and since I can’t exactly let them wander about without supervision, they “force” you outside.
posted by Araxie on 2-12-2012 at 12:22 pm