According to a 1936 newspaper I just read folks in Texas would place a peep in a glass jug and raise them for awhile and sell them as novelties. The cops got wind of one who was 6 weeks old and barely able to fit so they freed the hapless cluck. Them ol’ boys sure had lots of fun back then.
Beck, have you ever heard of this?
Never heard of this, but when I was a kid the flea market/Farmer’s market/auction market at Easter used to sell chicks whose eggs had been injected with dye, so that when they hatched they were brightly colored. At least for a while.
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Do people really dye baby chicks for Easter? - MyNorthwest.com.
Sounds similar to the “bonsai kitten” hoax.
How about jugged fish?
Mother: Whaddaya want with yer jugged fish?
Klaus: 'Alibut.
M: The jugged fish IS 'alibut!
K: Well, what fish 'ave you got that isn’t jugged?
M: Rabbit.
K: What, rabbit fish?
M: Uuh, yes, it’s got fins.
K: Is it dead?
M: Well, it was coughin’ up blood last night.
K: All right, I’ll have the dead unjugged rabbit fish.
By odd coincidence, I ran across a Wikihow about that a few days ago.
Huh, I thought this was going to be about recipes for a particular style of cooking chicken, similar to jugged hare.
I never heard of this version referring to putting a live animal in a jug. Yeesh, that sounds cruel.
Well, my ol’ grandma ‘jugged’ hens.
That was what she called preserving a whole chicken in a large canning jar. It was a cleaned hen, vinegar and salt, and processed in a pressure cooker.
I really hate to tell this next part, but here goes: my Gramps, between making and drinking his own wine he ran a large pullet concern. 2 very long chicken houses. A big named chicken corporation would bring chicks. He would tend to the houses and chicks, with help from his not-so-smart hired men.
Every morning the dead were cleared out. My granny had first dibs. Yeah. I know it’s gross. But she did it. She had 13 children. They hadda eat something. Any thing left after her daily need was ‘jugged’ for hard times.
They ate chicken 3 times a day. Chicken and waffles or biscuits was invented somewhere, folks.
Gramps apparently had lots of success in his farming activities.
He left loads of land in his will…it was cut up in so many pieces amongst his children that no one had much. But enough in prime area. Around Hot springs, Ar , that some were able to sell big.
Jugging live chicks doesn’t surprise me at all.
I did the same keeping beetles and small lizards in jars as pets til I learned how mean it was to do so.
Isn’t it similar to keeping snakes and geckos, mice and rats or other small creatures in your home?
I assume they’re kept in some cage or aquarium (jug?).
Just a quick perusal thru newspaper archives I found references in 1936 to a man in Dallas and another in Denver who had bottled a hen and rooster, respectively–and independently to control their diet (so they said). Didn’t find any obvious stories about bottled chicken novelties.
How did they clean the feces away? Have you ever seen how messily a chicken feeds? Leaving the cruelty aside for the sake of the argument, it sounds disgusting.
I’m thinking they didn’t live long enough to worry about too much poop.
ETA have you ever been in a chicken house. Lots and lots of poop? Sorta just goes with the territory. Chickens don’t care.
As a novelty, I’m assuming most Moms wouldn’t allow the jug thing in the house.
There is always Jugged Hare. "First catch your hare:
We flew over a pullet farm one day; it startled them. The newspaper wrote an award-winning article about it - Pullet surprised
Appalling!
Cute! 
In huge commercial chicken houses all the manure falls through into a pit. Chicken manure is very high in nitrogen and ammonia and hydrogen sulfide builds up over time. It’s a thing for a workman to be working in the pit when the ventilation system fails. Deaths happen.
The worst job I ever, ever did, bar none, none even close, even slopping out horse and cattle stalls in the muckiest of spring weather, was moving egg laying hens past their prime on the semis to be made into soup.
I’ve seen the semis unloaded and the birds fed onto the assembly line (late 80s). They didn’t even look like chickens! The process was so horrific I stopped eating chicken for a year or two.
Well, to the extent I understand the point, they’d have to live long enough (and eat enough) to grow significantly in size.
I did the job regularly from the time I was able to carry a couple of chickens in each hand (around 9 or so) until our family got out of the chicken business when was 14. Getting rid of manure wasn’t that big of a deal; there was a thing that pushed it to an augur the took it to the manure spreader outside. We had a pretty small operation, with only 5000 hens.