What are We Really Consuming?
Every single day Americans consume over 200 million eggs, and most people share the common belief that "Chickens lay eggs no matter what, so it’s not cruel to eat eggs.” Little to the knowledge of many, the egg industry has done an impeccable job of keeping us in the dark.
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Since eggs are a product of only one gender, females, it stands to reason that the egg industry only needs female chicks and not male chicks.
How do they achieve this? Does the hatchery genetically engineer chickens who can only produce more females? This is, of course, not the case. Do they take all of the male chicks and ship them away to a cozy little all-male farm, where they can grow up and live their lives in peace and prosperity? Or are they dropped into a grinding machine – tossed around by a spinning drill before being torn to pieces by a high-pressure macerator?
Here we have it: the cold, ugly truth. Male chicks do not get genetically weeded out before birth, nor do they get the wonderful Chick Heaven that your mother and father might have told you about when you were just a little kid and you didn’t want to eat your eggs. Instead, these chicks are literally ground alive by a terrifying metal death trap because they offer no profit to the hatchery business.
Let’s say, for whatever reason, you remain unfazed. Perhaps you’re not concerned about what happens to male chickens, only female chickens. When we accept what the “humane” egg industry tells us, we’re led to accept the idea that chickens could care less about what happens to the eggs we take from them. So long as we keep them warm at night and feed them, they’re happy as a hen can be, right? There’s reason to believe that this simply isn’t the case. Because many hens have their chicks aggressively taken from them, they begin to overcompensate by egg-laying in a frantic attempt to fill the void in their nest. The egg-laying process itself takes a great deal of strength and effort from a hen, and to have a hen work herself over the limit just so we can sell her eggs or eat them ourselves does not seem like the definition of kindness, compassion, and understanding
towards animals.
Let me give you a brief run-through of the life of a hen. To start off, she is either purchased as a chick or hatched on site. Her brothers are terminated. To recap, male chicks are "not needed" by the industry, so they are either gassed, crushed or suffocated.The hen then has her beak trimmed and is placed in a battery cage, usually with other hens. In these maddening conditions, hens will peck one another from stress, causing injury and even death. Rather than give them more room, farmers cut off a portion of their sensitive beaks with a 700-800° Celcius blade without giving them any sort of painkiller. A chicken’s beak is loaded with nerve endings, more sensitive than a human fingertip. Debeaking can be so painful for chickens that many die of shock on the spot; others die of starvation or dehydration because using their beaks is so excruciating, or their mutilations are so disfiguring that they cannot properly grasp and swallow any sort of food. Many birds die of shock on the spot Since my goal is to provide you with the facts, the following “humane” egg labels permit and routinely practice debeaking: Certified Organic; Certified Humane; American Humane Certified; Process Verified; Free-Roaming; Food Alliance Certified; and United Egg Producers Certified. In addition to debeaking, forced molting through starvation is also permitted in much of the egg industry. Essentially, the practice of starving hens for profit is known as forced-molting. Molting literally refers to the replacement of old feathers by new ones. In nature, birds replace all their feathers in the course of a year to maintain good plumage at all times. A natural molt often happens at the onset of winter, when nature discourages the hatching of chicks. The egg industry exploits this natural process by forcing an entire flock to molt simultaneously. This is done to manipulate the marketplace and to pump a few hundred more eggs out of exhausted hens before they are sent to the slaughterhouses.
To continue, female chicks are sent to egg farms, where, due to decades of genetic manipulation and selective breeding, they produce 250 to 300 eggs per year. In nature, wild hens lay only 10 to 15 eggs annually. Like all birds, they lay eggs only during the breeding season and only for the purpose of reproducing. This unnaturally high rate of egg-laying results in frequent disease and mortality. 95% of all egg-laying hens in the U.S. – nearly 300 million birds – spend their lives in cages that are so small they cannot even stretch their wings.
Packed in at 5–11 birds per cage, they can only stand or crouch on the cages’ hard wires, which cut their feet painfully. In these maddening conditions, hens will relentlessly peck at one another from stress and anguish, and starving or malnourished hens will even attempt to ingest one another’s feathers in search of nutrients. In a natural environment, chickens can live 10 to 15 years, but chickens bred for egg-laying are slaughtered, gassed or even thrown live onto “dead piles” at just 12 to 18 months of age when their egg production declines. During transport, chickens are roughly stuffed into crates and suffer broken legs and wings, lacerations, hemorrhage, dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia, and heart failure; millions die before reaching the slaughterhouse.
In addition, when the layer hens reach the slaughterhouse, they are removed from
their crates and hung upside down by their feet while fully conscious.
First, their heads will be dragged through a bath of electrically charged
water, rendering most of them unconscious. They are then taken to an
automatic neck cutter, where they are bled. After that they go to a
scalding tank, which makes it easier to pluck them. To make thus even worse, sometimes the hens are not fully dead or unconscious when they are put into scalding water, so these poor hens would painfully suffer until they drowned in this hot, hot water.
their crates and hung upside down by their feet while fully conscious.
First, their heads will be dragged through a bath of electrically charged
water, rendering most of them unconscious. They are then taken to an
automatic neck cutter, where they are bled. After that they go to a
scalding tank, which makes it easier to pluck them. To make thus even worse, sometimes the hens are not fully dead or unconscious when they are put into scalding water, so these poor hens would painfully suffer until they drowned in this hot, hot water.
Since I'm not going to tell you what to do concerning your consuption of eggs, I can at least provide you with the facts. So if all of this has not changed your opinion of the egg industry, it is my duty to educate you, as the reader to differentiate between the different types of eggs you may find at your local grocery store.
Omega-3 and DHA eggs come from chickens who produce these eggs are usually factory raised, but unfortunately are riddled with stress hormones and antibiotics as well as toxins from their feed, so though many people have the misperception that these hens are fed right and thus we get more nutritious eggs, these poor hens are unfortunately overloaded with unnatural hormones that truly have negative effects on the hens themselves.
A cage-free label indicates that chickens have lived entirely free of cages. In the case of chickens raised for meat, these birds are rarely ever caged before transport to slaughter, according to HSUS, “this label on poultry products has virtually no relevance to animal welfare.
Free range birds are confined to warehouses, where they may technically have access to a door that leads to designated outdoor area, but because of the mass crowding of birds – it is highly likely that many will never see the daylight during their extremely short lifetimes. According to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), “no information on stocking density, the frequency or duration of how much outdoor access must be provided, nor the quality of the land accessible to the animals is defined.”
Pastured eggs are sourced from a local farmer, these chickens live their lives outdoors, eating a natural diet of insects, worms, seeds and grass, with the occasional--naturally more nutritious, but nevertheless, many organic farms permit beak cutting and forced molting.
On a separate note, many people are deceived into thinking that eggs cannot be substituted in recipes, but in all reality, you can use applesauce, flax seeds and a 3:1 ratio of water to flax seeds, you can use chia seeds, a mashed banana, or even a cup of vegan yogurt. Many sources state that eggs have an excellent source of choline and a very good source of selenium, biotin, vitamin B12, vitamin B2, molybdenum, and iodine. Additionally, they are a good source of vitamin B5,protein, phosphorus, vitamin D, and vitamin A. BUT eggs are definitely not the only way to get these vitamins and beneficial substances, for example
Also, though this is very controversial, there are many scholarly resources that show the damaging effects of the amount of cholesterol in eggs. The amounts of plaque along the patients’ arteries who had high levels of egg yolk consumption (at least three egg yolks per week) were two-thirds that of the patients who had smoked at least 40 pack-years. In simpler terms, this suggests regular egg consumption isn’t that much healthier than smoking two packs of cigarettes per day for 20 years!
Unless you want to support and create a higher demand for the cruel treatment of chickens you have seen in this post, then my advice for you would be to stop eating eggs entirely. Ultimately, if you are going to decide to consume eggs I suggest that you make sure you know where your eggs are coming from, and if you wouldn’t firsthand perform these practices on roosters and hens, then please don’t purchase and support the farmers that do.
