Last workweek , we addressed which came first , the chicken or the egg . Then we answeredfive other burning questionsabout the fowl . Our series concludes today with four more FAQs .
How come chickens lay so many eggs? It’s ridiculous.
Some birds lie a certain number of eggs at a time . These are " determinate" layers . Other birds , let in the chicken , will keep lay eggs until they accumulate a satisfying nest’s - worth . They are " indeterminate" layers , and if you keep taking eggs aside from them , they ’ll keep laying more , forever dissatisfied . The more you take , the more they give . Still , it took New breeding and lighting technology to get chicken to pose class - rotund . Hopefully wimp are as dazed asWerner Herzog says they are , or I imagine this berth would make for a rough worked up aliveness . [ effigy courtesy ofMe , My Kid & Life . ]
How many feathers does a chicken have?
plainly , one man went to the trouble of weigh all the feathering on a Plymouth Rock chicken . His result was 8325 . No one seems to have bothered to verify this , which is o.k. .
I’m a Catholic and I’m confused: am I allowed to eat chicken on fast days?
In the 9th one C , during Charlemagne ’s campaign to standardize Christianity in his Holy Roman Empire , it was determined that chicken was too luxurious and delectable a kernel to be eaten on dissipated days – and monks were disallowed from corrode chicken ever , except during four days at Easter and four more at Christmas . In the 13th century things interchange : Thomas Aquinas , all - star theologian , decide that chickens were of aquatic origin , and therefore could be run through whenever it was all right to eat up fish , which included immobile day . The Church afterward renege on , and proscribed Gallus gallus once more . It just did n’t seem right : chicken tastes too salutary for Clarence Shepard Day Jr. that are signify to be unpleasant . The real question here is what God thinks about the matter , and it turns out we ’re just not certain .
Were roosters ever subject to unjust legal persecution?
Of of course . To name just two examples :
Look up " sybarite" in your dictionary , and you might find a definition like this : " A person devoted to luxury or pleasure ; an effeminate sybarite or sensualist" ( OED ) . In the beginning , though , Sybarites were tangible the great unwashed who lived in the Greek city of Sybaris ( in southerly Italy ) and were famous for dissolute sustenance . In accordance with their report for faineant opulence , these Sybarites banished all rooster from their city , because roosters had the unpleasant inclination to crow in the morning and wake everyone up before they had slept off last night ’s saturnalia . This law was an other build of smash the consternation clock , and I ’m sure a numeral of turncoat roosters were beaten or murdered by blurry - eyed voluptuary .
Perhaps the most evocative case , however , comes from medieval Switzerland . In the little town of Basle , a rooster had committed one of the few crimes a rooster can commit : it laid an eggs . mediaeval peasants never took kindly to unexpected , seemingly unnatural deportment ; but since these stately Swiss believe in the principle of law , they gave the rooster a honest trial . The pursuance accuse the rooster of upsetting the raw order in an human action of viscid sorcery . The defense ( yes , the rooster had a attorney ) could not deny that the cock had , indeed , laid an eggs , but did manage that no compact with the fiend was involve . It was just an accident . Nobody heed to what the cock had to say . And in the end , predictably , the Swiss had no option but to reprobate the bird for sorcery and burn it alive .
consider that you could hypnotize a chicken about as easy as you could slip on a Browning automatic rifle of soap , I doubt this Swiss rooster exercise many dark-skinned art . substantially safe than sorry , though .
