Orloff chicken
The Orloff is a breed of chicken named after Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov, a Russian Count. Reflecting this origin, it is sometimes called the Russian Orloff or simply Russian.
For most of its history, the Orloff was considered to be a product of Russia and Orlov, but modern research has discovered that the breed first appeared in Persia, and was distributed across Europe and Asia by the 17th century. However, Count Orlov was a key promoter of the breed in the 19th century, and the breed became known in the West following his efforts.
Orloffs were first introduced to Great Britain in the 1920s, and were also refined a good deal in Germany; Germans created the first miniaturized bantam Orloff by 1925. The breed was once included in the American Poultry Association's breed standard, the Standard of Perfection, but it was removed due a lack of interest from breeders. In the 21st century, the Orloff remains a rare breed in the West. The Livestock Conservancy lists the breed as critically endangered.
Chicken
The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a domesticated fowl, a subspecies of the red junglefowl. As one of the most common and widespread domestic animals, with a population of more than 19 billion in 2011, there are more chickens in the world than any other species of bird or domestic animal. Humans keep chickens primarily as a source of food, consuming both their meat and their eggs.
Genetic studies have pointed to multiple maternal origins in Southeast-, East-, and South Asia, but with the clade found in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa originating in the Indian subcontinent. From India, the domesticated chicken was imported to Lydia in western Asia Minor, and to Greece by the fifth century BC. Fowl had been known in Egypt since the mid-15th century BC, with the "bird that gives birth every day" having come to Egypt from the land between Syria and Shinar, Babylonia, according to the annals of Thutmose III.
Terminology
In the UK and Ireland adult male chickens over the age of one year are primarily known as cocks, whereas in America, Australia and Canada they are more commonly called roosters. Males less than a year old are cockerels.Castrated roosters are called capons (surgical and chemical castration are now illegal in some parts of the world). Females over a year old are known as hens and younger females as pullets although in the egg-laying industry, a pullet becomes a hen when she begins to lay eggs at 16 to 20 weeks of age. In Australia and New Zealand (also sometimes in Britain), there is a generic term chook /ˈtʃʊk/ to describe all ages and both sexes. The young are called chicks and the meat is called chicken.
Chicken (disambiguation)
Chicken is a type of domesticated bird. See also Chicken (food).
Chicken, chickens, or the chicken may also refer to:
Film and television
Music
Songs
Chicken (video game)
Chicken was a 1982 computer game for the Atari 8-bit series written by Mike Potter and distributed by Synapse Software.
The game is modified version of the Atari arcade game Avalanche, replacing the buckets and boulders with a hen trying to catch her eggs.
An unrelated game, also known as Chicken, was a type-in program in the first issue of Antic Magazine, but this was a clone of the game Frogger.
History
Mike Potter joined Synapse in 1981 after writing the game Protector and initially distributing it through another company, Crystalware. When he questioned his royalties, they released the game back to him. He rereleased a version through Synapse with a number of bug fixes.
Chicken was his first game written entirely at Synapse, and the first who's idea was given to him by Synapse's founder, Ihor Wolosenko. Wolosenko's primary inspiration was arcade games, and many of Synapse's releases from this era are adaptations of contemporary games for the Atari platform. Wolosenko had also come up with the idea for Slime and assigned it to a new programmer, but Potter had to take over development of that game as well, once development on Chicken was complete.
