Chicken Run/Headscratchers

• Fowler is the only rooster before Rocky comes along. Yet all the hens (save two) lay eggs before he appears and after he leaves, briefly. Think about it.
  • Further, the hens freely give away their eggs to be harvested, but only get really upset when they find out they're going to be harvested.
  • In Real Life, some hens can lay unfertilized eggs despite never having seen a rooster.
  • Modern hens in general are specifically bred to produce eggs without the help of a rooster. The eggs you buy at the supermarket and eat for breakfast are unfertilized.
    • (Which means you're eating chicken menstruations.)
    • Oh please... Is that really any worse than eating Chicken Embryos? Still taste the same.
    • Agreed. Also, I can tell you from experience that hens don't need roosters around to lay eggs (I raise hens myself, I have several good laying hens and no rooster) and they don't care that much about their eggs unless, as the troper below says, they're going "broody" with them. In fact, if you take an egg right out from under a hen who's just laid it and throw it on the ground and break it, they will go totally nuts with excitement and they'll devour it, shell included. Also, as I can once again say from previous experience, some of them have no problem eating dead chicks, particularly if the chick died only partially hatched. Think about THAT in a human context.
    • Also, modern hens don't care if you walk off with their eggs, so long as they aren't sitting on them. An exception happens when a hen goes "broody," at which point she'll sit on about a dozen until they hatch. If you plan on taking * those* ....wear leather gloves.
    • If we look at it in the rules of the movie, the chickens are still prisoners and have little say in what happens to them; it's possible that they've been there long enough to get resigned to the fact that their eggs are going to be taken from them. Note that one of the things Ginger enthuses about when making her speech about life outside the farm is the freedom to keep their own eggs.
  • More to the point, where do all those chicks come from at the end? Fowler and Rocky are still the only two Roosters.
    • They're probably all Rocky's - roosters aren't really into monogamy.
    • There's the off chance of wild roosters too.
    • The answer's pretty obvious isn't it? Fowler and Rockey got busy!
      • But....roosters can't lay eggs.
• What seems to be bugging everyone here is Perfectly Normal Chicken Behavior. And old Fowler was plenty to make sure all the hens were taken care of, despite his age. Make of that what you will, but hey, they're just chickens.
• If the Tweedys turned all their chickens into pies, that would be the end of their profits. They wouldn't have any chickens to make a second batch with, much less get rich or fill the stores with "box upon box of Mrs. Tweedy's Homemade Chicken Pies".
  • They would buy more chickens (for a price cheaper than what they'll be selling their pies for)
  • That's one option, but since they're already all set up to farm chickens it'd probably make more sense to buy a couple of roosters, depending on how much space they have and how many pies they want to make.
• I'm just wondering... in the final scene when it seems like Mrs. Fowler cuts Ginger's head, and then we see that she just ducked, how is she able to hold the lights with all of Mrs Fowler's bodyweight for several seconds?
  • The character's name is Mrs. Tweedy. In response to your question? Probably Rule of Funny and/or Rule of Cool, considering what happens next.
  • Gravity doesn't apply until Mrs. Tweedy notices she's not still connected.
• Hey wait. Why would Mrs. Tweedy not believe Mr. Tweedy about the chickens being organized? 2 minutes into the movie and they're forming lines and standing at her attention!
  • I think what it means is that Mrs. Tweedy believes the chickens to be stupid and blindly obedient (hence the lining up,) while Mr. Tweedy believes they're smarter than that and are hiding something.