It just seems like the math doesn’t add up. Like I eat a healthy diet and I get tired just pooping out the bad stuff, meanwhile a chicken can eat non stop corn and have enough “good” stuff left over to create and throw away an egg the size of their head, every day.
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Selective breeding mostly.
The wild undomesticated ancestor of our chickens just lays enough eggs to sustain the population. Maybe a dozen per year.
We have been breeding chickens to be better livestock for thousands of years. We have been selecting the ones that were better eating or laid more eggs every generation and also selected for traits that made them better at being kept by humans than their wild cousins.
Surprisingly enough, while we have been doing it for 5000 years or so, much of the “progress” has happened in the last century.
Chickens kept by farmers a century ago had less meat on them and laid fewer eggs than their modern counterparts.
It took as 5000 years to go from 12 eggs per year to 120 and a century to go from 120 to +300 eggs per year.
The chicken from a century ago looked much more like their wild ancestors than modern ones who have grown to comparatively enormous sizes.
None of this is particularly healthy for the chicken and the way we keep them is not really helping things either.
But that is okay the ones meant to be eaten only have to live long enough to become big and fat before they are processed and the ones laying eggs may have a short live laying eggs, but new egg layers are relatively easy to come by. It doesn’t take long to go from a freshly hatch chick to a chicken old enough to lay eggs herself (Don’t google what happens to the freshly hatched male chicks who can’t grow up to become egg layers, they are too small and numerous to easily kill the way you would kill animals normally and the alternatives people have come up with may seem quite horrible.)
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