How hard is it to be a chicken? It's not as simple as you think! Insiders tell the truth

Yesterday when buying fried chicken, next to a young lady while eating fried chicken legs to the boss said: 'chicken is really delicious, really give us these girls who are afraid to grow fat a great benefit'.

Indeed, when you think about it, the figure of the animal chicken seems to be all over our whole life, what chicken legs, eggs, fried chicken, cassoulet, chicken curry rice, chicken heart ...... All of them are our must-have delicacies.

The reason why we can eat so many delicious "chicken products" is because we have domesticated the chicken creature.

In fact, chicken is almost the last animal we domesticated, humans domesticated dog about 15,000 years ago, cattle about 8,000 BC ...... Chickens were not domesticated until about 4000 BC and did not become mass produced and raised until about 1800 BC.

There are many types of chickens, such as crow, broiler, turkey, pheasant, etc. The cooking method is also very simple, but its life is actually very tiring, only people do not notice it.

The "difficult life" of chickens

The normal hatching time for chicks is 19 to 21 days. Only fertilized eggs with normal embryos can be hatched, while others are sold directly as eggs, and the temperature during incubation is 36.5 to 38.5 to ensure normal embryonic development.

If the eggs are not at the right temperature or are affected by bacteria during the incubation process, the embryos will stop developing and the poor chicks will be taken away and processed as raw eggs.

After about 20 days of development, the chicks finally break out of their shells and see the world for the first time, and those who cannot break their shells successfully are thrown directly into the crusher.

Those chicks that break their shells normally are hung up and vaccinated within 24 hours of birth, followed by the Newcastle vaccine and the infectious bronchitis vaccine in about 7 and 14 days.

In between, many hatching companies hire professional "sexologists" and as soon as a male is found, he is immediately thrown into a crusher and turned into feed for other animals.

If it's a broiler, it only takes about 40 days to get out, because the chicken meat is the most tender in this period, they will be pulled to the slaughterhouse for processing.

Before I have done such a job, live broiler chickens were pulled over, directly pulled by the neck hanging to a hook, the back to kill chickens and processing, some chickens are pulled off the body, not dead, very cruel.

If the chicken is used to lay eggs, it only needs to be kept for 6 months before it can lay eggs, and it starts to reach its peak egg-laying period in 160 to 180 days. If the chicken is in good health and no diseases occur, the peak period can be maintained for 3 to 4 months, and it will generally be eliminated by 15 months, or it will be put into the human table.

How long is the life span of a chicken?

Generally, chickens in chicken farms can only stay until about 500 days before they are culled, but hens raised in rural areas are much luckier, generally laying more eggs can be raised for three or four years, and those laying fewer eggs are killed early, but there are generally few more than five years, because hens are too old to be eaten.

Previously, when the economy was not developed, the need for roosters to sound and their own hatching, large roosters with beautiful colors have become the pets of many families and have a higher status in the family, but now there is no need for roosters to sound, and roosters are slowly becoming more rare.

However, there are some elderly people will raise chickens until six or seven years, the average life expectancy of chickens is 6 to 7 years, the longest can reach 10 to 13 years, because after the chicken is 3 years old, hormone secretion will begin to decline, the egg production will be greatly reduced.

However, the longest living chicken certified by Guinness World Records has lived for at least 20 years and 304 days (as of March 1, 2023), and the longest-lived chicken ever recorded is a red-feathered pheasant in the United States that lived for 23 years and 152 days.

Conclusion

So it's really very hard to be a chicken, because it never knows how long it will live, and in the morning it's still clucking, and at noon it may have to be put on the table.

This also tells us a truth that all life is worthy of our respect and treating food not to be wasted, which is what each of us should do.