A chicken collapsed from stage fright during a rehearsal for a play in northern Queensland.

Ron Hamilton of the St. James Players said the hen fainted during a dress rehearsal of Johnny Belinda.

He said the chicken had a piece of string tied to its leg to stop it from straying. The fowl passed out just inside the set, which meant every actor had to step over it to get on stage.  Rather than walking on stage to collect the traumatised animal, the crew removed it by dragging it slowly off-stage by the string.  Mr Hamilton said the dress rehearsal was well attended by pensioners who had the chance to see the show for free. 

The ill-fated chicken was an attempt at obtaining the authentic sound of hens for the opening scene of the play, which is set in a poor Canadian farming community, reports the news.com website.

© Associated Press

A cook has cracked open a hen's egg to find another perfectly formed egg inside.

Ann Cockcroft, 56, says she was making scrambled eggs for workers at a branch of Waitrose in Gosport, Hampshire, when she made the discovery.  The smaller egg measures 3cm in length - around a quarter of the size of the egg it came in, which also had a yolk.

Mrs Cockcroft said: "I have never seen anything like it. You expect to get the odd double yolk, but to find a whole egg inside another one really is just incredible."  Branch manager Tony Probert, who has kept the undamaged miniature egg in his office, said: "We were all astounded."

The egg, produced by a free-range Colombian Blacktail hen, came from supplier Stonegate which delivers 27 million eggs a week. Tony Sayer, a business account manager at Wiltshire-based Stonegate, explained how the egg within an egg was created.

"They happen when a young hen is learning to lay an egg properly," he said. "The yolk normally goes through the hen's body and into its shell gland, a shell is produced and the egg laid a few hour later.

"With this egg, the yolk passed to the shell gland as normal but the hen didn't quite get the hang of the last part. Another yolk followed and a second shell was created around the first. It is very, very rare. I have only seen a few in all my 30 years in the egg industry."

Eggs with two yolks, which are more common, are formed when a young hen does not create the shell for two days and then lays.

[NOTE: We have never seen one like this - Pete]

"You cannot separate the breeding from the fighting," said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "The purpose of raising the birds is to fight them. There is no legitimate agricultural activity occurring." 

The Internal Revenue Service says agricultural organizations include groups that cultivate land, harvest crops or aquatic resources, or raise livestock. The agency confirmed it had received the Humane Society's complaint but couldn't say if it was investigating. 

Larry Mathews, United Gamefowl's founder and spokesman, said the group saw nothing wrong with cockfighting where it's legal. Besides fighting, he said, the birds can be used for show, sold as brood fowl to foreign breeders, slaughtered and sold as organic poultry or Cornish game hens, or harvested for their feathers. 

"We've been audited by the IRS as recently as last year and came through with flying colors. We are what we say we are," said Mathews, of Silverton, Ore. 

In a cockfight, two roosters wear steel blades on their legs, are sometimes drugged and placed in a pit. During a typical tournament, one-third to one-half of the birds are killed. Many suffer broken wings, punctured lungs and gouged eyes. 

People who fight their birds argue that the sport is part of a long-standing American tradition. They say the birds don't feel pain during the fight.

"They are trying to come up with a way to justify their activity in the face of massive public opposition," said Karen Davis, head of the Virginia-based watchdog group United Poultry Concerns. "Cockfighting is not an agricultural practice. It's a blood sport." 

The practice is barred in every state except Louisiana and New Mexico. Voters in Oklahoma banned the activity last year, but the ballot measure is being challenged in court. 

United Gamefowl was formed as a tax-exempt group in 1975 while Congress was considering animal-fighting legislation. A law passed that year banned the shipment of gamecocks to states where cockfighting was illegal. 

A new law makes it illegal to ship gamecocks anywhere to fight. Shipping birds for breeding is allowed. Still, association leaders have challenged the regulation in a lawsuit that is pending in the U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana. Pacelle said the lawsuit bolstered the Humane Society's claim that United Gamefowl is a cockfighting organization. 

Still, some gamefowl breeders insist that raising the birds is not related to cockfighting.  Bob Hilsercop owns 30 gamecocks, roosters bred for their aggression in the cockfighting pits. For him, it's just a hobby. 

He no longer participates in cockfighting. But like other members of the association, he has sold many birds to buyers in places such as Guam, where cockfighting is legal. "When I was a young man, I was into fighting chickens. Now, I just raise them," said Hilsercop, 72. "I enjoy every moment of it. It keeps me off the couch." 

Don Perdue, a past president of United Gamefowl and state legislator from Prichard, W.Va., said he raises a strain of frost gray gamefowl because it was something he and his father did together while he was growing up. "The real breeders spend far more time just looking at those chickens than they do fighting them," he said.