Betty the Transgender Chicken – What Happened Next

Randy's Chicken Blog has moved to a new platform. You can find this story plus all sorts of other chicken info and tales of the Hipster Hens right here!

Sexing Chickens: The Art, Science, and History of Hen vs. Rooster

A farmer wanted to be able to tell which of his baby chicks were boys and which were girls so he enlisted the aid of a scientist.  “Well!”  said the scientist, “It’s really quite easy!  You simply scatter some crickets in the coop.  The boy chicks will only eat boy crickets and the girl chicks will only eat girl crickets.”

“That’s great!”  said the farmer. “But how do you tell the boy crickets from the girl crickets?”

“Why are you asking me about crickets?” the scientist retorted.  “I’m a chicken expert!”

And for the bulk of history after the domestication of chickens, sexing baby chicks wasn’t too far from that mark.  The bad news is that baby chicks are pretty much small, cute, fluffy, and indistinguishable, with their boy and girl parts mostly inside their bodies and out of sight.  The good news is that for a long time, it really didn’t matter a whole lot.

The Life and Times of Betty the Transgender Chicken

Randy's Chicken Blog has moved to a new platform - you can find this story plus all sorts of other chicken info and tales of the Hipster Hens right here!

The Birds and the Bees and the Chickens

If you’ve Googled your way to this blog looking for poultry porn, you’ve come to the wrong place.  Sorry to disappoint you, Foghorn, but this is simply an informational and scientific discussion of chicken mating.

If, however, you are offended by the concept of animals having nonchalant sex in public, this may be the wrong place for you, as well.  I grew up on a farm so animals having sex everywhere – all the time was simply part of my childhood, for goodness sake!  So it’s hard for me to appreciate why anyone would make a fuss about it.  If you’re going to make a fuss, though, just leave now and remember that this is the warped and twisted blog where they talk about vile animals having disgusting relations.