What's wrong with eating eggs?

Of all factory farmed animals, the laying hen is, by far, the most exploited: Laying hens spend their entire lives crammed into tiny cages about the size of a folded newspaper page. They are so tightly packed into the cages, often sharing the space with up to 8 other birds, that they are unable to spread their wings.  Stress and disease are rampant in laying facilities, and many birds die horrible deaths- some become entangled in the wire of their cages, some are pecked to death and others succumb to disease and infection. It is fair to say that these animals actually suffer to death. Veterinary attention is nonexistent. Dead birds are left to rot in their cages, adding to the stress and disease the live birds endure.

Laying hens spend their entire lives in cages so small they can't  spread one wing. To reduce stress induced cannibalism, hens are debeaked.

Probably the most pitiful aspect of a laying hen’s life is the frustration of all of her natural instincts. In freedom, hens are proud and protective mothers who take great delight in nest building and egg laying. A free hen will spend hours searching for a private and safe nest site. She takes great pride in the construction of her nest. On a factory farm, egg laying is a frustrating and unhappy time for the hens. Unable to find the privacy she needs or the nest material she craves, a hen will “hold” her egg for as long as she is able. When she can delay the process no longer, the hen will frantically scratch at the wire floor of her cage in a vain attempt to build a nest. She will search for privacy beneath her cage mates. Finally, she will lay her egg- only to watch it roll down the slanted floor of her cage to the conveyer belt which takes it away.

Egg laying hens are called battery hens because the are raised in "battery cages." Rows of cages are stacked in teirs so that a farmer may pack thousands of birds into a single warehouse.

Ultimately when a hen’s laying capacity wanes, she may be starved for up to 14 days in a process known as forced molting. The shock of this process jolts the hen into a final laying cycle. Many hens die during forced molting. After a lifetime of laying eggs for human consumption, spent hens are snatched from their cages, roughly stuffed into crates and transported to the slaughterhouse. There they will endure the terror of broken bones, shackles, electric baths and cutting blades. Their battered and broken bodies are too bruised and depleted to produce quality meat, so the meat of laying hens is often used in soups, pot pies and chicken nuggets.

These rescued laying hens are featherless shadows of healthy chickens. Having never touched the ground, rescued layers don't know how to walk. However, they welcome freedom and are soon stepping about, clucking, nesting and dustbathing.

What about the male chicks?

Each year, the egg industry kills millions of newly hatched male chicks. Future egg laying hens are hatched in industrial hatcheries, where thousands of eggs are incubated and hatched to produce the new generation of America's laying hen "flock." Newly hatched female chicks are sent to grow out facilities until they are able to produce eggs for the egg industry. Male chicks are simply killed. Useless to egg producers, male chicks are often suffocated in garbage bags, gased or simply thrown in the dumpster to die.

Millions of male chicks are killed each year by the egg industry. The photo above shows a dumpster full of dead and dying male chicks. At left, a live male chick is discarded in a dumpster with dead chicks.

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