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Cloaca of a red-tailed hawk. A cloaca (/ k l oʊ ˈ eɪ k ə / ⓘ kloh-AY-kə), pl.: cloacae (/ k l oʊ ˈ eɪ s i / kloh-AY-see or / k l oʊ ˈ eɪ k i / kloh-AY-kee), or vent, is the rear orifice that serves as the only opening for the digestive (), reproductive, and urinary tracts (if present) of many vertebrate animals.
Vent sexing in Wenchang, Hainan, China (2014). Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male.
[2] [3] Chickens raised for eggs are known as layers, while chickens raised for meat are called broilers. [4] In the United States, the national organization overseeing poultry production is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In the UK, the national organisation is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
A free range pastured chicken system. Pastured poultry also known as pasture-raised poultry or pasture raised eggs is a sustainable agriculture technique that calls for the raising of laying chickens, meat chickens (broilers), guinea fowl, and/or turkeys on pasture, as opposed to indoor confinement like in battery cage hens or in some cage-free and 'free range' setups with limited "access ...
Selective breeding over the centuries has produced hens that lay more eggs than they can hatch. Some of this progress was ancient, but most occurred after 1900. In 1900, average egg production was 83 eggs per hen per year. In 2000, it was well over 300. In the United States, laying hens are butchered after their second egg laying season.
Free range continued to be used, especially for breeding flocks and for pullets before they reached laying age, because of the lower rate of disease and greater overall health of grass-reared chickens. Breeding flocks (which lay eggs destined for incubation) are always given a better diet than flocks laying table eggs, since a diet that will ...
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The only living mammals that lay eggs are echidnas and platypuses. In the latter, the eggs develop in utero for about 28 days, with only about 10 days of external incubation (in contrast to a chicken egg, which spends about one day in tract and 21 days externally). [11] After laying her eggs, the female curls around them.