Mess With My Chickens And You Will Meet The Crazy Chicken Lady Shirt
Humans have been essential in creating the modern day, egg-laying hen. Our anthropocentric justifications for using domesticated fowl throughout history has contributed to their evolution in ways that would never have occurred without our initial and ongoing intervention.In other words, humans have acted and continue to act, as an artificial agent for natural selection. This is more true today given our technological capacity as it relates to the manipulation of hens at the genetic level. Today’s hybridization of an entire species has been purely for commercial purposes. We have commodified living beings and in so doing demoted the sanctity of sentient life itself.What are the origins of today’s egg-laying hen? Domesticated fowl likely evolved from jungle fowl in Southeast Asia and spread west towards India, Africa and eventually to Europe through trade and military conquest. Fowl were used for a variety of purposes from entertainment (cockfighting), meat, eggs and even religious sacrifice. Wild, or jungle fowl, typically laid eggs for the purposes of procreation like most other species.
Mess With My Chickens And You Will Meet The Crazy Chicken Lady Shirt
Their laying cycles were seasonal and commonly produced a brood in the spring. It is possible that “the breeding of hens to encourage egg laying may have begun as long as five or even ten thousands years ago.”1 Humans may have taken eggs from a nest for the purposes of either eating them or preventing them from hatching. This may have induced the birds to lay more eggs as a result and even beyond the normal laying season. It is important to note that, “egg laying as an independent activity detached from the giving of life is not a natural phenomenon in birds.”2 Despite this, the modern day hen can lay up to approximately one egg a day for up to 12 to 18 months before their production declines and they become spent – an industry term to describe when a hen is no longer profitable and is sent to slaughter.Egyptians were the first known culture to produce chickens and eggs in large-scale production reminiscent of today’s factory farms. The Roman’s created “specialized chicken farms”3 that utilized hen houses and other methods to keep predators at bay and infectious diseases from gaining a foothold whenever animals are maintained in close confinement.