Ten Things You Should Know About Eating Eggs
A brief rundown of why eating eggs isn’t good for chickens, you, or the environment
1. Chickens are very intelligent, sensitive and social. They have communication skills as complex as some primates. Karen Davis, PhD, president of United Poultry concerns states that “chickens are endowed with memory and emotion that influence their social behavior, and have a keenly developed consciousness of one another and their surroundings. … chickens recognize each other as individuals, especially after they’ve been separated.”
2. 95% of egg laying hens in the US (nearly 300 million birds) are kept on factory farms, where they spend their lives crammed into battery cages. Battery cages are around 67-76 square inches- smaller than the size of a standard piece of paper. Anywhere from 5-10 birds are kept in one of these.
3. The egg industry is responsible for the deaths of 6 BILLION male chicks yearly- simply because they can’t produce eggs. After hatching, chicks are sexed. Females are sent to lay eggs in a factory farm or sent by mail (which is extremely cruel and often results in the death or injury of the chicks) to suburban farmers. Males are killed either by being ground up alive in a macerator or suffocated to death in the garbage.
4. Hens often will endure a process called force molting. This is when the hen is intentionally starved and kept in the dark for anywhere between 5 and 14 days, resetting her reproductive cycle and causing her to produce a large amount of eggs. This will be done repeatedly until the hen is spent.
5. Hens are slaughtered when their productivity declines, which is usually between 18 and 24 months. If they are not killed on the way to the slaughterhouse, they will be cruelly killed and put into premade supermarket foods like canned soups, frozen dinners and other similar low grade chicken meat products. Chickens whose bodies are too destroyed or who are already deceased will be ground up alive, gassed, thrown into landfills, or turned into livestock feed. Even on “high quality”, certified humane egg farms, it is standard practice to kill the chickens when keeping them is no longer profitable.
6. You might think, “well they make the eggs anyways, why not eat them?” This is untrue. Chickens, even alleged “heritage” breeds, have been severely damaged by selective breeding and hormones which cause them to produce a wildly high amount of eggs- 250 to 300, whereas a wild bird will lay only about 10-15 a year. Not only that, but they will usually die after 4-6 years- if they are not killed first- due to incredibly painful reproductive diseases. The natural lifespan of a chicken is between 10 and 20 years.
7. What about backyard eggs? Well, even ignoring the cruelty that takes place at the hatchery, suburban farming is still unethical. Chickens have no way to consent to the consumption of their eggs, and eating them shows a complete disregard for their bodily autonomy. They also will keep laying eggs so long as they are taken away, because they are trying to create a clutch in an intensely strenuous process. Vast amounts of calcium are leached from their bones to produce the shell as the egg passes through their reproductive system. This is best gained back through the consumption of their eggs and the shell.
8. The egg industry is an environmental disaster. It takes approximately 3 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of eggs. It takes an average of 200 liters of water to produce one single egg, which is 2400 liters (or 634 gallons) to produce a dozen. Egg farms are also largely responsible for ammonia gas emissions due to bird feces. Speaking of feces, poop from farm animals is a major water polluter, having already contaminated over 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated the groundwater in 17.
9. Eggs are not healthy! They’re just not. Eggs are very high in cholesterol, which contributes to the risk of heart disease. A Harvard study found that eating a single egg a day appeared to cut women’s lives as short as smoking 5 cigarettes a day for 15 years. Harvard research also concluded that eating a single egg a day is “associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes in men and women” and that eating eggs was “positively related to mortality”. The American Dietetic Association has concluded that heart failure risk is higher with higher egg consumption. It has also been discovered that consuming just 2.5 or more eggs a week increases the risk of prostate cancer by 81%. In fact, eggs are not legally allowed to be advertised as healthy or nutritious because it is considered to be false and misleading. However, this does not stop the American Egg Board from having a yearly advertising budget of $10 million, which they maintain via government subsidies.
10. Eggs are easily replaceable. It’s easy to make vegan versions of egg dishes, find substitutes for nutrients found in eggs, replace them in recipes, and to have delicious vegan meals without chicken ovum.
How to go vegan: one two three
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