35 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Chicken | Amazing Facts 4U
- The chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, is a domestic subspecies of the red junglefowl, a member of the pheasant family that is native to Asia.
- It is believed by scientists that chickens were domesticated about 8000 years ago in India & China.
- Amazingly chickens were at first domesticated for the cruel “sport” of cockfighting and not for food.
- There are over 25 billion of them in the world, that’s more than any other bird and about 4 times the population of the world. About 450 million hens are used a year for eggs.
- More chickens are raised and killed for food than all other land animals combined.
- Amazingly the chicken is one of the few things that man eats before it’s born and after it’s dead.
- Chicken contains 266% more fat than it did 40 years ago.
- 8 billion chickens are consumed in the U.S. every year. 22 million chickens are consumed every day.
- Chickens are able to remember and recognize over 100 individuals.
- Chickens have full-color vision. They have no color blindness which is associated with many animals.
- Chickens experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which in fact means they can dream just like we do.
- Chickens are just like human mothers who talk to their babies during pregnancy. Amazingly a mother hen begins to teach calls to her chicks before they even hatch.
- A hen can lay more than 300 eggs a year.
- A mother hen turns her egg approximately 50 times in a day. This is to make sure that the yolk does not stick to the shell.
- If the white of the egg is cloudy, it is fresh. The record number of yolks in an egg is nine!
- A freshly laid egg is 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The record number of eggs laid in one day by a chicken is seven.
- Because of their sensitivity to infrared light, chickens see daylight about 45 minutes before humans do.
- The color of a hen earlobes will usually determine the color of the egg shell. Farmers know hens with red or darker colored earlobes are most likely to lay brown eggs and hens with lighter colored or white earlobes will usually lay white eggs.
- A chicken heart beats more than 300 times a minute.
- The chicken can fly for a limited period. The record flight time for a chicken is 13 seconds.
- The amazing fact is that a chicken’s beak can bleed.
- Chickens don’t pee. It is just mixed into the poop.
- A chicken who just lost its head can run the length of a football field before dropping dead.
- Amazingly chickens have more bones in their necks than giraffes!
- Chickens have evolved a very sophisticated social behaviour with a dominance hierarchy where higher individuals dominate subordinates. This is where the term pecking order comes from!
- The dominant male (cockerel) protects the females (hens) and they choose to feed close to him for safety.
- Chickens perform over 30 types of complex vocalization with meanings varying from calling youngsters, alarm calls, and alerting others to the whereabouts of food.
- Chickens have different alarm calls for specific types of predators, which allow them to know the type of threat they face and what sort of anti-predation behaviour to perform.
- Amazingly chickens are able to comprehend that when an object is taken away and hidden from them, it still exists. In contrast young human children are unable to understand this.
- Hens are extremely affectionate and caring mothers. In Ancient Rome, saying ‘you were raised by a hen’ was really a compliment.
- Chickens in fact can’t taste sweetness in foods but they can detect salt, and most choose to avoid it.
- Chicken hypnosis also called “tonic immobility” refers to a sort of catatonic state triggered by fear in chickens. Chickens can be tricked into this state by holding the chicken on the ground and drawing a straight line in front of its beak. The chicken will focus on the line and become hypnotized, remaining completely motionless even when its legs are released. The chicken can remain in this trance like state for anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes.
- The male chicken was chosen to be the mascot of the 1998 FIFA World Cup.
- Avian influenza (bird flu) is extremely contagious and fatal for chickens. The highly pathogenic form of the disease can kill most of the birds in a flock in just 48 hours.
- The chicken was the first bird to have its genome sequenced, in 2004.
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