Chicken God is Great Coffee is Good and People are Crazy Shirt

Social HierarchyEach flock of chickens develops a social hierarchy that determines access to food, nesting sites, mates, and other resources. A flock usually includes one dominant adult male, a few subdominant males, and two or more females that are carefully watched over by the dominant male. Social hierarchies in chickens are segregated by sex and manifest as a pecking order, in which individuals of higher social rank may strike out at individuals of lower rank with their beaks (pecking) to ensure access to food and other resources. Altercations, however, may also include pummeling with wings and scratching with claws.Chickens belonging to the same age cohort and sex are often kept together in industrial production settings. The pecking order is established within groups of female chicks by the 10th week of life. In groups of male chicks, however, fights for dominance may continue into adulthood. In situations where one adult bird challenges another—which happens most often when a new bird is introduced into the flock—fights involving males risk injury and death more often than fights involving females.Domestication And Economic ProductionChicken domestication likely occurred more than once in Southeast Asia and possibly India over the most recent 7,400 years, and the first domestications may have been for religious reasons or for the raising of fighting birds. Descendants of those domestications have spread throughout the world in several waves for at least the last 2,000 years. For most of that period, chickens were a common part of the livestock complement of farms and ranches throughout Eurasia and Africa. Only in the early 20th century, however, did chicken meat and eggs become mass-production commodities.

Chicken God is Great Coffee is Good and People are Crazy Shirt

Organic free-range chickens (Gallus gallus) clustering around a henhouse in Devon, England. Members of free-ranging flocks may live for six to eight years© BananaStock/JupiterimagesModern high-volume poultry farms, with rows of cages stacked indoors for control of heat, light, and humidity, began to proliferate in Great Britain about 1920 and in the United States after World War II. Females (mature hens and younger chickens, called pullets) are raised for meat and for their edible eggs. Farmers have developed numerous breeds and varieties to fulfill commercial requirements.Egg-producing hens (Gallus gallus) in an industrial henhouse. Under ideal lighting and heating conditions, female chickens may produce one egg every 23–26 hours.&se7enimage/FotoliaOriginally, meat production was a by-product of egg production. Only hens that could no longer produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat. By the mid-20th century, however, meat production had outstripped egg production as a specialized industry. The market for chicken meat has grown dramatically since then, with worldwide exports reaching nearly 12.5 million metric tons (about 13.8 million tons) by the early 21st century.