I looked up feral cats on Wiki yesterday, but it didn't say anything about their breeding habits. I think you're right, though, about them not killing their male kittens. Adult feral cats might live in all girl colonies but, if they killed their male kittens, where would all the tomcats come from? What you said makes more sense, they chase their male kittens away as soon as they are sexually mature.
I don't know about lady cats, but our vet told us when we had Scamp that, if we didn't get him fixed when he was six months old, we might as well forget it. The reason most owners of tomcats get them fixed is to prevent them from carousing around at night and coming home all scratched up. The vet said that, if you get them fixed too late in life, they will still go carousing and get into fights because they think they are still males. I understand that's true of farm animals too. There is an optimum age to castrate the males that you don't want to breed so they will put on more weight and not get into fights with the fertile males. A steer who gets fixed too late will think he's still a bull and will act like one for the rest of his life, except for the breeding part.
Now that you mention it, I don't remember ever finding eggs in any of the game birds I have cleaned. I have never cleaned any domestic ducks or geese, but my hypothetical wife thinks that their egg laying is a seasonal thing too. With fish it's different. You can always tell if a fish you are cleaning is a male or a female because the males have this white sperm thing and the females always have eggs inside, no matter what time of year. Fish spawning is a seasonal thing, but they must start growing new eggs or sperm for next year as soon as they are done depositing this year's batch. The females get quite big around just before they spawn, I believe the technical term for female fish in that condition it "gravid", but next year's eggs are not noticeable until you eviscerate the fish. The males seem to look the same on the outside no matter what stage of development their sperm is in.
There is nothing wrong with eating fertilized chicken eggs, we did it for years with no ill effects, unless a hen has started incubating them, or maybe if they have been out in the sun too long. When you crack open an egg, that stringy white thing attached to the yolk is the embryo, and they all have it. If you collect your eggs once a day and keep them refrigerated, the embryos will not begin to develop. If you crack open an egg and the embryo seems to have blood in it, that means it has started to develop. I think that's what they are checking for when they candle eggs. I don't know if those bloody eggs are eatable or not. Whenever my hypothetical wife finds one she says "Oh gross!" and throws it away. I don't remember finding a lot of those when we had our chickens, or when we bought farm eggs from people afterwards, certainly no more often that we find them in supermarket eggs even unto this day.
Hens are always fussing and squabbling with each other, but it seldom gets very violent. Anytime I witnessed something like that, and the rooster broke it up, he just got between the litigants and stared them down. Roosters are more aggressive than hens, ours even challenged me once. He flapped his wings and crowed at me, so I responded in kind, and he backed down. The only thing was, when the hens saw me coming after that, they would shuffle their feet and squat down just like they did for the rooster, which was kind of embarrassing. The rooster we had before that one used to strut up and down along the dog pen fence just to aggravate the dogs, until he got a little too close and lost his head one evening. Roosters crow all day long, not just at sunrise. They don't crow at night though, which is why that first crow in the morning is so noticeable.
We've got tons of books in the house, but we seldom buy them anymore because there is no place to put them. Anyway, I have found it's easier to look things up on Wiki than it is to rummage through the book collection trying to find something I read decades ago.
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