As someone who raised chickens: they could care more about family ties.
Of course there will be differences between breeds and individuals but some things I witnessed:
- roosters, brothers by blood, fighting to the death
- chickens stealing eggs from each other
- chickens eating their own eggs (animals with good feed, grass and oister shells to peck on, fully available)
- younger chickens ganging up on the matriarch
- chickens killing their own chicks with no need to worry for lack of resources
Chickens are not gentle. In great enough numbers, chickens will even attack their predator. The birds can evaluate risk/success odds.
Again, there are more tame breeds and less tame ones. Some are the spawn of the deep pits where nightmares fester and grow.
Far to many people that have no experience with animals give them human thoughts and competency.
That’s a mouth full.
Sometimes it seems we are too evolved for our own good but I like to think this tendency of ours will lead to a greater good.
That theory goes out the window when you have a city sliker meet a farm animal in person. One of my favorite childhood pass times was seeing city blokes cower in fear of petting a chicken or goat especially when that same person has pictures of chickens in their home because they are cute
The goat I understand. Those fuckers are mean, and they bite. Who TF is afraid of a chicken? Turkey, sure. Again, they are mean and big enough to fight back. The chickens found out that they “can” become soccer balls if they piss off the ape that is bringing them food.
I’ve got a mug from a town I used to live in. It’s a rooster with the name “Shitty Larry” written across it. He was a local celeb. A rooster so badly behaved he had to be rehomed, and the people who adopted him created a whole lifestyle around dealing with his “antics”.
As I was leaving, Fucking Frank was also coming into the spotlight.
They’re assholes. But they taste good.
I live in a largely portuguese area, but there are definitely “cousin” dishes to Coq au Vin, chicken and chourico (or linguica) stews with a dash of saffron or paprika, some good portuguese wine. Deliciuos.
What people need to realize, especially those in peta, is that we cannot compare the suffering and mass killing animals to the same happening to humans. Speaking to someone who loves animals, they are a completely different life form that do not have human morals, values, intelligence, or emotion.
Which isn’t to say that they don’t have their own intelligence or emotion, it’s just very different from what the human thought process is like.
Thus it would be absurd to put them on the same pedestal as homosapiens, evolutionarily speaking.
Life is not a Disney cartoon, that I understand that I will be down voted by vegans who don’t understand this and will call me cruel.
That said I obviously support the Humane treatment of animals, but if you think I’m going to stop eating a creature that would eat me with far less hesitation if the roles were reversed, you are truly a fool.
We had chickens when I was a teen. They regularily hunted, killed and ate small rodents, lizards/snakes and sometimes even small birds like young sparrows whenever they could catch them - everything that fits into a chicken’s beak is fair game. And it wasn’t exactly a pretty sight. Imagine a single panicked field mouse being chased by sixteen feathered mini velociraptors, all trying to kill the mouse first, and then all fighting each other FOR the (hopefully) dead prey, as noone ever wanted to share their kill.
Funnily enough, the rooster was was a cuddly little idiot. (he got beaten up by the hens occasionally)
And just t add some proof for some of the points above, here’s a video of a single hen killing a hawk (warning, it is kinda graphic). They don’t even need great numbers to shred their wannabe predators - one really p*ssed off chicken and an opportunity to strike back, that’s all it takes.
I didn’t witness it but there are a few chicken farms around the area - the kind where chickens can freely roam around a huge shed - and I was told from an acquaintace that works at one they had been on the lookout for foxes, as they had already destroyed a few coops around the farm.
One morning they arrive at the barn to find a few dead chickens and two foxes partially skeletonized on the floor. It was a gruesome sight and the recording from the security cameras showed the foxes had been completely overrun by a mob of angry chickens that pecked, kicked and essentially killed by the thousand cuts method the poor wannabe predators.
The few chickens the foxes managed to kill were not enough to deter the mob but instead served to further spur it into a killer frenzy.
Because foxes are a protectes species, they had to call the authorities to give notice and have the cadavers picked up. Even the municipal vet was horrified at the state the chickens had left the foxes.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
here’s a video of a single hen killing a hawk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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i’ve heard chickens will just casually peck others to death if they have a wound too, like it’s not even malice or removing competition, they just do it from some fucked up instinct.
I own chickens and have had a bullying problem in the past. In the winter they have a lot less space and they get bored and stressed easily. The hen that took the “rooster”/protector role started pecking the smallest and sweetest chicken and drew blood. I had to keep the small chicken isolated from the flock for a few weeks while its wounds healed and put special goggles on the bully chicken for a month- they prevent it from seeing in front of itself so it forgets what’s there after a few seconds. Yeah they can be vicious, but it’s definitely preventable if they’re raised right instead of at a factory farm.
I’m pretty sure i saw somewhere that mexican cartels would use pigs as a method to dispose bodys pretty grim
You could save all of this cruelty by using egg substitutes and faux meats instead.
I could keep these little dinosaurs as pets, with no other objective or purpose besides admiring them because they are pretty to look at and that would not prevent any of the behaviors I listed.
What I’m about to say may evade you but cruelty is not an exclusive trait to human beings and chicken are a good example of it. They can be extremely cruel towards their own kind just for the sake of it. Not out of scarcity of food or living space. Just because they want to make another animal miserable.
The only one I’m having trouble thinking of an example is the chicks rising up against the matriarch, but that’s simply because I cannot think of an example of a matriarch in The Bible. The rest are covered in the Old Testament, possibly even The Torah.
The Torah and Bible are actually based on stories derived from watching chicken society fail to develop? This is my new headcanon
they could care more about family ties.
ugh, the consequences of internet grammarian fascism: people using normative language to make a quirky riff on a nonsense “rule”
I thought he meant what he said literally. They could care more but choose not to.
They’re intelligent and very instinctive birds from birth- that doesn’t mean that they’re vicious though. My chickens that I’m raising are all sweethearts. It’s all a matter of their environment. If you overcrowd them in an indoor factory farm of course they’re going to turn on each other, they’re extremely stressed out. Chickens that are raised outdoors with lots of space and different kinds of food are a lot less likely to act up and turn on each other. You can even taste a noticeable difference in eggs from happy chickens.
Roosters on the other hand are usually fucking assholes.
I had about a dozen chickens in an outdoors coop, with plenty of space (about 32 cubic metres of tridimensional space) and often carried them around in a chicken tractor (birds of prey area where I live) for grazing and some individuals exihibited extreme behaviors.
Again, variations will occur from breed to breed and from individual to individual.
Some breeds are especially known for being tamer than others and more concerned with eggs and brood than others.
I’ll partially agree on your statement that all roosters are assholes: we had one that enjoyed crowing when we were trying to talk anywhere in the bird’s line of sight.
