The inhabitants of ancient India domesticated wild banking chickens about 4,500 years ago. Now it is the most widespread and numerous poultry. In the industry, chickens are used to produce nutritious meat, eggs, fluff and other valuable products.
What are the breeds of chickens in poultry farming
Domestic birds - chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese and others - are divided into breeds. They differ from each other in the qualities that a person uses for his needs.
Breeds are bred artificially by selection. So, egg-bearing breeds of chickens (Russian white, Leghorn) are bred to obtain a large number of eggs. There is little meat from them (these chickens weigh from 1, 6 to 2, 4 kg), but each layer is capable of laying 200-270 eggs per year.
Chickens of egg-bearing breeds (May Day, Zagorskaya) give enough meat and eggs. Meat breeds carry few eggs, but have a large mass: for example, plymouthrocks can reach up to 4 kg. Chickens of meat breeds are used to raise fleshy chickens weighing more than 1.6 kg at two months of age.
When do cocks and hens reach puberty and how is it expressed?
Sexual maturity of males occurs in the third month of life, and females - in the fourth. The gonads at rest are many times smaller than in the active reproductive period of the bird. The weight of the testes in a rooster at the onset of puberty increases by 20%. The chicken's ovary also becomes larger and begins to resemble a ripe bunch of grapes in outlines, on which "berries" are strung - thin-walled bubbles with eggs.
What happens when a chicken egg matures
When the egg cell matures, the membrane of the bubble bursts, and the mature egg falls out of it and enters the oviduct. This is where fertilization takes place. Regardless of whether the egg was fertilized or not, for some time it is still inside the bird, matures, becomes covered with a shell, and only after 23-26 hours it comes out. The excretory pathways of the reproductive organs, as well as the ureters and intestines, in chickens open into the cloaca. Eggs usually emerge from the oviduct with a blunt end forward.
Sexual intercourse in chickens
Despite the different internal structure of the reproductive organs, in roosters, like in chickens, they also open into the cloaca. The mating process of birds occurs as a result of close contact with cloaca - the so-called. "Anal kiss". The grooming of a chicken for a chicken can hardly be called erotic: a chicken with a heart-rending clucking runs away from an anxious male, and he, overtaking the caught "bride", grabs her by the feathers on his head, furiously tramples and brings his twisted cloaca closer to the cloaca of the female, eventually spewing out into her its seed. Rooster spermatozoa can remain viable in the hen's oviduct for up to 20 days.
