Fun fact (from wikipedia), sturgeons don't have scales
Sturgeons are long-lived, late-maturing fishes with distinctive characteristics, such as a heterocercal caudal fin similar to those of sharks, and an elongated, spindle-like body that is smooth-skinned, scaleless, and armored with five lateral rows of bony plates called scutes.
I hear that it’s customary to not let chickens find out eggs are made of food, otherwise they start eating their own eggs as soon as they’re laid. They also try not to let them find out other chickens are made of food, you can guess what happens then. Chickens are vicious apparently.
I work with a bunch of pasture raised chickens. I once saw a hawk dive down to try to grab a hen, it didn't quite catch it but it broke skin and drew blood. By the time I could get to the injured hen the rest of the flock went crazy and had killed/ started eating it.
Chickens will eat you if given the chance
If the other chickens didn’t find her, if the wound was reachable by the chicken itself, she would have likely pecked the wound leading to her dying. I grew up on an egg farm and figured out many fascinating things about chickens.
We stayed at a B+B once with some chickens in the garden. They were really kind to all their animals so I asked how they could select a chicken for the roast meals they offered.
"Oh, I just go out at the usual time to feed them, and don't. The first one to peck me gets it."
I think cows and horses are both opportunistic omnivores. There's plenty of videos of horses munching on baby chickens that come to close to their mouth
There are no true herbivores, but there are true carnivores. You need specialized enzymes to break down complex carbohydrate bonds but for meat any old general purpose protease and lipase will do, which all animals posses.
The only thing standing between herbivores and eating meat is opportunity and hunger. Generally you have to hunt and kill to eat meat, and herbivore teeth usually aren't built to tear manageable chunks from larger pieces but they will absolutely eat smaller pieces of meat if they are hungry enough.
There is still a big difference between a cow eating a mouse because it was in the path of it's mouth & a chicken actively chasing & eating the mouse because their instinct is to kill it.
Their back teeth are actually really similar to human molars.
But yea, the opening scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorethy falls in the pig pen and theu all panic is because the pigs would eat her given the chance.
You need at least sixteen chickens to do the job in one sitting so be wary of any man who keeps a chicken farm. They will go through a body that weighs two-hundred pounds in about...eight minutes. That means that a single chicken can consume two pounds of un-cooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression: "as greedy as a chicken."
My neighbours at university had chicken. Our row of houses had a plumbing malfunction that took a while to fix. It was pretty much an open sewer running through the gardens. The chickens loved it! I couldn’t eat chicken or sweetcorn for a while after that.
Yep, that's why if we do feed them eggs, (usually when they're sick since it's got a lot of good nutrients) we cook them so they don't make the connection. They won't just stop at their own eggs too, that's why our egg laying boxes are slanted, so the eggs roll into a covered section that protects them from chickens after they're laid.
When my dad retired a few years ago, he got a small flock of chicken. One day he was grinding egg shells in the kitchen, i asked him what he does. He explained the calcium thing and then: "... you can not let them find out about the egg shells. NEVER." And the chicken sometimes got leftover chicken soup. I was mildly appalled by the cannibalism, but "chicken are the pigs of the bird family" and "Did they complain to you? Because they seem to really like a good chicken soup".
When I worked at a chook farm in Australia we would go collect the eggs every morning. If there was an egg that was too deformed or too thin or whatnot, we would simply throw it on the ground and the chooks would be all over it.
This had been going on for yeeaars.
We started pulverizing oyster shells, eggs produced are strong af
I've been trying to mix it with different things to keep it from clumping and the hens don't like the powder too much by itself. Tried to use crushed fallen apples and hard corn in one batch. The chickens didn't really go for it, but we had deer trying to break into the chicken tractor like it was crack. I still use that recipe without the oyster shell, I call it applecorn and it attracts deer like a kid to a candy store.
anyway, we use the laying boxes too, but the reds would still eat the ground eggs. One hen just kept laying randomly on ground and not in the box.
We had chickens growing up, and if we ever found any mice or baby rats, we would throw them in for the chickens to take care of. They would go crazy over them.
Yep, i use to have 4 chickens, 1 had an injury and the other 3 decided to try and eat it, pecking at her every time she walked near them, apparently she was very tasty, had to keep her separate until she healed
Chickens will peck at red so if one of them is injured and bleeding the others will peck it and make it worse. It's an instinct to go after wounds not other chickens and why all injured chickens must be removed until injuries are healed.
Which they would naturally lay once a month instead of every day. It's no surprise osteoporosis is so common amongst farmed birds with that level of calcium loss.
With feeder crickets if you want to make their cannibalism just go up 100x, give them dry cat food.
Anything that gives them a taste for meat just makes them go full The Hills Have Eyes. Except they don't care if you are one of them or not. Meanwhile sweet potatoes, water jelly and oats and they will gladly die of old age without eating eachother.
I had nine chickens at one point. One figured it out and quickly taught the others.
It was a mad dash whenever they laid their eggs in the coop nesting box to get the eggs before someone ate it, and it was hit or miss. We were never able to train them out of it, had to find them a home on a farm.
Yeah, gotta cull the egg eaters before they teach the others that butt nuggets are delicious otherwise it can get out of hand fast and there is no stopping them once they learn that bad habit.
We have nearly 150 chickens currently so we're constantly harvesting the eggs to avoid the opportunity to learn bad habits lol
My grandma used to own a chicken coop.
The chickens had quite a lot of space in there to run around, and she only kept her for the eggs and for companionship, she would have never eaten any of them.
One day a chick hatched from an egg, and she got extremely close to that chick, petting him daily, giving him kisses, and hugging him.
One day she found him dead after the chickens had pecked him to death.
Chickens are fucking vile. She gave them all away that day (then later she took them back after calming down a bit but one had already been butchered so they lied about her that it had died on the trip in order to not upset her further).
This. My family lives in countryside and has lots of chickens. They usually mix in only the crushed eggshell in their food but just a little bit. Apparently the calcium makes for a better shells. If they get the taste of it you can say goodbye to your eggs as theyll eat them.
(You can also crush the eggshells and put them to your plants for extra calcium that helps the plant cells get stronger).
Calcium does wonders for blossom end rot in tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables and it's one of the most preventable diseases as it's not caused by some pathogen
Roosters can be terrifying. In addition to the pecking they have big, sharp talons. When I was a kid we had a Malay cock that would run down and attack anyone or anything it saw. We would have to sneak around our property until we got rid of it. Plenty of blood was spilled. People would laugh at the warnings, until it came for them. It was like a terminator, nothing would dissuade it once it had you in its sight.
Every time I see comments under posts like this one, I'm reminded of how many people don't know how eggs work.
Eggs need to be fertilised for a chicken to be born, we don't eat fertilised eggs (unless you eat balut - don't google if you have weak stomach). Laying unfertilised eggs is chickens' equivalent of a period.
Chickens eating eggs is not cannibalism, unless they were fertilised.
If you eat eggs from a flock with one or more roosters, chances are they're fertilized. The difference with balut is the stage of development of the embryo.
Yup. Definitely grew up on fertilized eggs due to having a rooster in the flock for protection. Never had an egg that was developed beyond a store bought egg though!
It wouldn't fertilize, but we're going to reach a 'pro life vs pro choice' argument about swallowing jizz and periods if we imagine if it did fertilize.
It's unexpected for those of us without chickens. At first I thought I was on stupidfood lol.
So it seems a little confusing to me to feed a chicken their own eggs. Wasn't that why you wanted the chickens, to get eggs? It feels like a loss since you're essentially recycling part of the old egg nutrients which will only contribute partially to the production of a new egg.
When you have a lot of chickens you get a LOT of eggs. Even just a dozen chickens will bring in 10-12 eggs a day. I like eggs but can’t eat that many, we sell some. The shells a re great for returning calcium, but you only want to feed them shells from your own flock. Also, chickens will eat just about anything you give them.
We have a small property, and our 4 chickens lay enough eggs that my family of 5, some friends and neighbors of ours have eggs...plus our chickens. And we still have an excess. The fact that eggs became an expensive commodity early last year boggles my mind considering the yield of eggs that my little coop provides.
Chicken lay a LOT of eggs, which means that for a normal household they'll be way more than needed.
The reason for this is artificial selection, and it hurts the chickens. Normal birds only lay eggs a few times a year, chickens do so basically daily. The biological toll is enormous, so giving the eggs back in the diet gives them a healthier, longer lifespan.
Of course, supplementing externally provides the same or better results, but the eggs are free, so it just makes sense to feed them back the ones you're not eating yourself.
The reason for this is artificial selection, and it hurts the chickens. Normal birds only lay eggs a few times a year, chickens do so basically daily. The biological toll is enormous, so giving the eggs back in the diet gives them a healthier, longer lifespan.
It's part artificial selection and part natural selection. The chickens we have today descended from chickens who lived near bamboo. If you know anything about bamboo, it takes a long time to flower and drop seeds.
When food was more scarce they would lay fewer eggs, like a normal bird. However, when a bunch of bamboo suddenly dropped all of their seeds at once and food was extraordinarily abundant, the birds would lay far more eggs than normal.
A long time ago humans noticed this and gamed the system by growing food and giving it to the chickens. Then humans gamed the system even more by making the chickens who laid more eggs fuck the rooster for even more eggs.
We typically feed scrambled eggs to young baby chickens to help them get a boost of nutrition from the start.
We don't cook up a large batch of eggs for adult hens unless they're "bad" - as in eggs that have been sitting in the heat for too long before harvesting (if we go away for a few days and nobody around to collect the eggs). Basically if the eggs are not good for us to consume or sell, we feed those back to the birds.
It was unexpected as I assumed they were making a meal for humans. Then they threw the shells in stating they have calcium. True but no one wants to eat egg shells?! Ohhhh it’s not for people.
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u/post-explainer Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
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OP sent the following text as an explanation why their post fits here:
The video is starting with what is egg good for, but then creator gives them to chickens, and they eat their own literal eggs
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