Dr. Schmidt explains the world: laying eggs until menopause?

Steffen, a small group of colleagues with solid knowledge are of the opinion that a chicken does not have to be fertilized in order to lay eggs. Is that correct?

That is correct. Chickens are birds, and in terms of evolutionary history they came right after the dinosaurs, and like lizards, eggs are laid, but only the fertilized ones produce offspring.

So do chickens also sit on unfertilized eggs?

I haven’t read that yet, and with the laying hens everything is done to ensure that they don’t even get the idea of ​​wanting to breed.

Laying eggs is something like the visible cycle of the hens.

That’s how you could say it.

And that goes from puberty to menopause?

Menopause was more of a late development in evolution. The individual is only useful for the preservation of the species as long as it can reproduce. Only in primates and whales does a grandparent generation occur that plays a role in the group. Chickens usually die before they stop laying eggs. And that too in the wild.

Where is she actually?

The ancestors of our domestic chickens probably lived in Southeast Asia and only came to Europe late. In ancient Mesopotamia people already kept cattle and sheep, but not yet chickens. Today it is the most common farm animal of all.

Is the number of eggs a chicken can lay limited, like the eggs in the human female ovary?

In principle yes, but apparently this limitation can be outsmarted if the moult is artificially induced. This means that not only the feathers are renewed, but also some of the reproductive organs.

What is ultimately crucial for a chicken to lay an egg almost every day? That one is taken away from him every day?

That’s the crucial point, yes.

The more it lays, the sooner the natural reservoir will be exhausted?

I agree with that. In the laying batteries of industrial agriculture… It just occurred to me that when this started in the GDR, the abbreviation “KIM” appeared on the egg packaging, meaning Kombinat Industrielle Mast. You can’t really say more clearly what the whole thing does. Today you can find idyllic names like “Wiesenhof”. Cage farming for direct egg sales has now largely disappeared in the EU, but when whole eggs are purchased in commercial kitchens, it is not so clear where it comes from.

You don’t want to think about it.

Yes, that’s how it is with nutrition. By the way, our evolutionary ancestors, the other primates, were also egg predators. Even the cute squirrels are nest robbers.

And so the laying hens are bred on the one hand and trained to lay on the other?

Rather than training. It is the breeding that has “optimized” the chickens. That’s why the male chicks are murdered in an unfriendly way. The chicken breeds that lay a lot of eggs are not necessarily good at producing meat. There are now attempts to breed high-performance breeds that can do both well. Some old chicken breeds were probably able to do this before, but they just didn’t lay as many eggs and didn’t produce meat quite as quickly.

Of course, the question still remains: What came first – chicken or egg?

The egg will definitely have been there first. The interesting question is whether what hatched after brooding surprised the hen or not.