Welcome to Litsy!

If you've been following my posts, you already know how much I have enjoyed this fascinating book. Warning about the chapter on industrial farming practices: it's gruesome.
Chicken is one in a series about animals published by Reaktion Books. I will look for more!

Instead of a natural lifespan of up to twelve years, the typical farmed chick today will live for about six weeks.

From realism to naturalism, impressionism to cubism, Dadaism to surrealism, the chicken has inspired the masters, and a surprising number of great artists have instances of chicken art in their body of work.

Portrayals of chickens in earlier 20th-century fiction & film cast them as augers of prosperity due to the wealth that new intensive farming practices promised to generate, while chicken characters post-1970s are more likely to be trivialized [...]

Bahuchara Mata, Hindu goddess and patroness of the hijra (transgender and intersex) community [...] sits on a rooster, this bird symbolizing innocence.

Up until the nineteenth century it was common for cockerels to be buried in the foundations of a church to keep evil at bay. As symbols of the Resurrection they were often carved on church steeples, and shaped into weather vanes, where they could turn their famed vigilance in all directions.

In Switzerland in 1474 a rooster found guilty of heresy after allegedly laying an egg was burned at the stake along with his egg.

It is said that 'as long as women create pysanky, the powers of life prevail but when the last woman to make pysanky stops doing so, then evil will reign triumphant over Earth.'

Ulisse Aldrovandi [1522-1605] : "I raised a hen who, in addition to the fact that she wandered the whole day alone through the house without the company of other hens, would not go to sleep at night anywhere except near me among my books."

In order to leave the eggshell a hatchling will 'pip' or break it with her 'egg tooth,' the sharp point projecting from the tip of the upper mandible of the chick's beak (the subsequent loss of this temporary protrusion has given rise to the phrase 'as scarce as a hen's tooth').

The giant incubators invented by the ancient Egyptians - possibly to sustain the masses of labourers involved in the construction of pyramids - were capable of hatching up to 15,000 eggs at one time.

I'm just starting this nonfiction book about chickens. Chapter 1: From T. rex to Transylvanian Naked Necks. (I can already tell I'm going to want to share a lot of fun facts. Be warned.) 🐓