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 Vet: Chicken Has Sex-Change
by The Associated Press
Posted: May 24, 2007 - 7:00 pm ET
(Calcutta, India) A chicken has gone through
a rare, spontaneous sex change in eastern India, a veterinarian said Thursday.
The bird laid eggs six months ago - and some
hatched - but it later began to grow a rooster's comb, said Partha Sarathi Ghose,
a veterinarian at West Bengal state's Animal Husbandry Department, quoting the
bird's owner.
Earlier this week Ghose and a team of experts
visited the village of Kamat-Chengrabanda where the incident occurred.
Ghose said the bird had undergone a process of
natural sex change.
``Sure, it's rare,'' the veterinarian said,
adding that owner Haziruddin Mohammad has called the incident a miracle and
refused to hand over the bird to the Animal Husbandry Department.
``Every once in a while you hear a story about a
hen that changed into a cock. Such stories are often met with skepticism, but
sex reversals do, in fact, occur, although not very frequently,'' says a 2000
report published by the University of Florida's Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences.
The study said spontaneous sex reversals can
result from damage to one ovary.
It said that there are reports of some such birds
fathering offspring, but that most never do.
©365Gay.com 2007
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