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Well Cornish Rocks may not have been the appropriate name, but the hybirds used for producing eggs that are send to be incubated and hatched as broiler chicks to be butchered are the ones I am talking about. My family and I have both worked in the large houses with the huge hybrid birds that sound much like what chick_magnet described in the last post. They are used for producing eggs that will hatch to become meat birds, not for the eating egg market like leghorns. These are kept in the long breeder houses with a row of nest boxes in the middle and the eggs are brought in on a conveyor belt and collected by the workers. And like chick_magnet, these are huge birds with the hens reach 12 poulds easily and they have short stumpy leggs and cant walk far and its more of a duck waddle when they do walk lol . And the roosters in there are nearly the size of turkeys and you can barely pic them up. And yes, the hens sometimes get combs as large and what normal backyard roosters get. and at the end of the year, when their egg production starts to drop, they are all shipped off to the butcher plants to be grinded up in processed foods becuase at this age they are too tough to be used as regluar young meat birds are. And when they go out, there are always a few escapees and the owner of the house told us if we can catch them we can have them so we load them up and turn them loose in the yard for a while and like chick_magnet said, they will drop a few pounds when they come off of that commercial feed but the look healthier when they lose a few pounds and regrow there feathers that were lost from the crowded conditions in the breeder houses. We usually end up eating most of them but we may save a few of the nicer looking hens to hatch some chicks from.
