• usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 month ago

    The places one get chickens from are likely going to be the same or similar to the common commercial breeds.

    It’s also worth noting that domesticated breeds of egg-laying chickens haven’t been spared either :( They have been selected to lay so many eggs that it harms their bone health. It takes a lot of calcium to make eggs, so naturally they don’t lay them as much. In the wild, they would also often eat their own unfertilized eggs to recover the calcium too. I’ve read that a fair number of animal sanctuaries actually give them medications to lower their rate of egg laying and let them eat their own eggs to recover that calcium

    Hens will often lay around 300 eggs per year. That’s very different from the wild ancestor of modern chickens – the red junglefowl – which lays around a dozen per year. And much higher than in 1900, when commercial hens would lay around 80 eggs yearly

    https://ourworldindata.org/do-better-cages-or-cage-free-environments-really-improve-the-lives-of-hens