Chickens for fun and profit

You know, I was going to write a proper blog post about this but I'm SOFA KING tired I'm just going to copy the contents of an email I wrote to my family.

I just got home at 9:15pm. I've had a nerve-wracking day due to the peculiar regulation that states that an egg which has not been pipped (hole poked in it by the chick) is not an animal, whereas an egg which has been pipped, even if you can only see a small SMALL point of beak sticking out, is an animal.

(Come to think of it, the US has similarly idiotic rules regarding what a human fetus is and how to treat it depending on whether or not it's inside the uterus.)

Anyway I was going to refrigerate some 20-day-old eggs today to kill the embryos, then cut them up. But, two of the eggs had been pipped. And not only that, they were making cheeping noises. So I had to call the RARC campus vet and ask her what to do. She said since they're pipped, I can't refrigerate them to death and instead have to CUT THEIR HEADS OFF straightaway.

Fortunately this only applied to one of them which was infected with my luminescent virus. The other one was the control and I half jokingly asked her if I could take it home as a pet. To my surprise she said yes.

Meanwhile I had a very boring day since I had to extract a lot of RNA samples.

And while I was doing that, the virus-inoculated chick almost cracked its shell half open! I picked up this rocking, cheeping egg and removed the shell. And then, I took this cute, newly hatched baby chick and cut its head off with a pair of scissors.

...it reminded me of the scene in Blade Runner where Roy Batty says to Deckard, "Wake up, time to die."

After cutting off its limbs and stuffing it in a 50 mL tube for deep-freeze storage, I took apart the rest of the eggs. Since they had been in the fridge from 10am to 8:30pm or so, they were quite dead. (On Monday I had found out the hard way that refrigeration for two whole hours is not sufficient to kill chicken embryos.) The beaks had pierced through the shell membranes, so they must have been breathing from the air pocket. A strange thing I noticed was that the yolk sac had at this point completely entered into the the chicks' bellies and become part of the intestine. Eggs are amazing things. They're like a little universe, a microcosmos.

Anyway...the other egg that had pipped is still in the incubator. If it hatches I'll take it home and keep it in my bathtub for a few days then I'll find someone to give it away to. Maybe just give it straight back to the campus Poultry Lab that I got the eggs from.