“The chicken came first; not the egg”!
A recent news report of this daily says that a Sri Lankan hen has put an end to an ancient debate among human beings over 'whether the chicken or the egg came first' at the cost of its own life. The hen has given birth to a chick without an egg. Generally, egg comes out of the hen's body and is incubated outside. But in this case, the fertilized egg developed within the hen's reproductive system and stayed inside the mother's body for 21 days until it hatched out. Though the chick is found fully formed and healthy but the mother-hen died. We came to learn form the report that the post-mortem carried out on the mother-hen's body diagnosed that it died of internal wounds.
In the proverbial sense, the saying is used to mean a debate on a worthless subject. Even so, it seems that this incident would not be able to change the age-old public notion. Though the chick came first in an unnatural way causing death to the hen, it is nothing miraculous but a demonstration of abnormality or disease in the hen in question.
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