I was raised on an egg farm with 40,000 chickens. This is all entirely complete bollocks. Egg-laying chickens look like any other birds, pretty much. The only time they suffered any particular injury is if they had to be put more than one in a cage (this sometimes happened briefly just before a cull of less productive birds), sometimes they’d peck each other. When kept in separate cages they were perfectly healthy and happy - if they weren’t, they wouldn’t lay.
I’ve heard that sometimes chickens in these factory farms have the tips of their beaks cut off so they can’t peck other chickens. tracer, maybe your friend heard about that and thought that maybe the feathers and eyes were removed too?
I don’t know about chickens, but a quail farm I went to used incubators because the birds had lost the instinct to incubate. You can’t just use a lightbulb because you have to turn the eggs every 6 hours or something.
That’s mostly accurate, although it’s unclear to me whether anyone actually tried raising them on a commercial scale.
Clipping of the beaks and spurs is what I remember the outcry was about. That was at a couple of chicken factories that supplied Tyson with chickens. I believe it was local though in Missouri when we lived there.
Once a week the dead wagon loaded with deceased chickens rolled down the highway around 2pm.
You could smell it before you even heard it. I stopped eating lunch on those days, too hard to keep it down.
Well done!
Well, in theory if you were good enough at genetic engineering, a chicken with everything but the bare minimum of body necessary to produce eggs could produce more of them for a given amount of nutrition. Of course, by that point you probably would end up with the “meat with tubes sticking out of it” that Erdosain mentions.
Oh, my. The pictures! Those poor things look off-balance.
It’s not so much “retelling an urban myth” as it is “learning about the worst sort of treatment commercially-raised chickens endure and then exaggerating that to the condition of all commercial chickens.”
Acid-burned eyes and rubbed-off feathers do occur, but it’s going too far to assert they’re all like that.
We had chickens for years when I was a kid, and I dispute that they’re especially dumb. A lot of our contempt for chicken mentality comes from three sources
[ul]
[li]Domestication has almost certainly cost them some brainpower[/li][li]We see what we want to see[/li][li]It makes us feel better to assume they don’t have any thoughts[/li][/ul]
I’ve seen a chicken outwit a cat. Granted, he was a Jungle Fowl, and possibly closer to the ancestral ur-chicken than the ones we’re talking about. He crowed a mighty crow, too, after he bested her, and well-earned.