Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Why do chickens lay so many eggs?

Why do chickens lay so many eggs?

I'm glad they do, don't get me wrong, I just started thinking.... Surely they don't have a natural desire to feed humans! So why DO they lay so many eggs? For survival, that's why! Chickens don't hatch easily, AND they die if you just look at them sideways. Here are the top ten causes of chicken deaths (in my  experience) that illustrate this point:*

10. When chickens are fertilized, they remain fertile for 40 days. Thus they can lay up to 40 fertile eggs before going broody. Then they sit on them for 23 days. They are lucky if 50% of them hatch. That's a 50% mortality rate right there. Before birth.

9. The baby chicks have to stay at 99.9 degrees F for the first week. That's pretty easy in my incubator (but harder than you'd think), but in the wild, Mom has to sit on them all the time. So any of the weak ones that can't fight their way under Mom's wing die the first night or the second.

8. Baby chicks also cluster together to stay warm, sometimes crushing or suffocating the bottom guy. Oops.

7. If they don't get exposed to your dirt early enough, they won't develop the antibody to coccidiosis, which can be fatal.

6. As they get older, they start playing on branches and boxes. But if they fall, oops, dead.

5. Even older chickens can get pushed out of a tree or fall off a roost wrong and, yes, die. They are NOT like cats. They don't always land on their feet. Au contraire, they tend to break their necks!

4. A laying hen can become egg-bound and, well, die.

3. A stupid chicken can eat a bad wild growing mushroom, and die. (I always thought they knew the difference, but I guess she was hungry.)

2. A chicken of any age can get a cold and die.

And the number 1 reason for chicken deaths . .. . .  They are eaten by many, many species, at all stages of life . . . . cats, mongoose, dogs, chicken hawks, snakes, and especially humans (roasted, broiled, baked, stewed, rotisseried, friccaseed...yum!).

*Note that despite the constant "chickens crossing the street" on the various islands of Hawai'i, and chickens dashing to avoid cars, I have never even once seen a chicken hit by a car!