Egg Production Articles from All-Creatures.org



Hen History

From Egg-Truth.com
December 2023

Humans have been essential in creating the modern day, egg-laying hen. Our anthropocentric justifications for using domesticated fowl throughout history has contributed to their evolution in ways that would never have occurred without our initial and ongoing intervention.

hen sketches

In other words, humans have acted and continue to act, as an artificial agent for natural selection. This is more true today given our technological capacity as it relates to the manipulation of hens at the genetic level. Today’s hybridization of an entire species has been purely for commercial purposes. We have commodified living beings and in so doing demoted the sanctity of sentient life itself.

What are the origins of today’s egg-laying hen? Domesticated fowl likely evolved from jungle fowl in Southeast Asia and spread west towards India, Africa and eventually to Europe through trade and military conquest. Fowl were used for a variety of purposes from entertainment (cockfighting), meat, eggs and even religious sacrifice. Wild, or jungle fowl, typically laid eggs for the purposes of procreation like most other species.

Their laying cycles were seasonal and commonly produced a brood in the spring. It is possible that “the breeding of hens to encourage egg laying may have begun as long as five or even ten thousands years ago.”1 Humans may have taken eggs from a nest for the purposes of either eating them or preventing them from hatching.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE. 

egg farm


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