ok, I will attempt to be polite. this will be further criticism but i’m not trying to insult or denigrate you.
it’s not mind reading, it’s reading comprehension and familiarity. OP: “she’s not using it. it’s not fertilized. it’s going to rot and attract predators. you want me to throw it away??”
Those sentences tell me three things
1) they already have the egg
2) there will be more eggs and something will need to be done with them
3) the eggs cannot be left in the coop or it presents a risk to the chickens
through these bits of information, we can infer that there are chickens in the coop producing eggs. OP themself is concerned about predator risk, so we can infer that OP is also the caretaker of the chickens. people who don’t own chickens aren’t really concerned about predator risk from leaving eggs in the coop. they typically don’t even know about it.
The immediate reply to OP who clearly owns chickens is “it’s still animal exploitation” (stupid) to which another person responded that chickens will eat their own eggs which they do not need because we provide their food to them while children working for slave wages halfway across the world would actually very much benefit from the food they are producing. especially examples like quinoa, which indigenous people who have grown and eaten as a staple crop for thousands of years have been priced out of due to western vegan consumption. it’d be like being priced out of bread or rice because rich people halfway across the world can pay more.
then you responded about factory farming conditions, which were never relevant to the discussion because the conversation was always about whether people who own their own chickens are Morally Bad for eating the eggs, which read to me as the classic and very annoying tactic of whataboutism.
I responded with “perhaps if you think domesticated animals only exist in factories, you are uninvolved in and uneducated about animal husbandry and your opinion is irrelevant.” it was mean and i probably should have been nicer, i’ll give you that. i’ll explain the critique thoughtfully now.
our relationships with our domesticated species took 150,000 years to mutually develop. I actually don’t love the term domesticated itself because it implies that humans alone orchestrated the creation of the relationship when we know that that is simply not true. we are symbiotic. chickens and cows and pigs and sheep get just as much from us as we get from them. there is nothing inherently or morally wrong with our relationships with our animals, and I honestly think it is so so so incredibly human that we decided to make friend with and love and care for our food their whole lives before it’s their time to enter the life cycle. additionally, we formed those relationships in specific environmental conditions (winter) where plants do not grow for multiple months of the year and animal products are required to survive.
the capitalist exploitation of animals is no better or worse than the capitalist exploitation of people. our relationships with each other are not inherently cruel and exploitive, the global capitalist system is cruel and exploitive. in the exact same vein, our relationships with animals are not inherently cruel or exploitive, the capitalist system forces that cruelty and exploitation.
veganism is the internalization of that exploitation as the true nature of our relationship, when it is not a fact of our nature. industrial farming is less than 200 years old. these relationships are 150,000 years old. it’s also not even environmentally friendly in the long term, it requires maintaining the capitalist framework of our entire agricultural system, which is just as damaging to the land and the plants as it is to the animals. farmland in the US has about 30 years before it will go entirely fallow due to industrial crop rotations. maintaining any kind of industrial farming practice, including the systems of crop rotation, global exploitation of humans and animals, and transport of staple vegan products, is a commitment to a food system that will destroy us and the land in equal measure. we need a radical systems change, not to deny, erase, or destroy our long-standing symbiotic relationships with animals that now rely on us for their health and safety. as a side note: I hate industrial husbandry and veganism equally for their total abdication of our responsibility towards our companions. imagining a world without them is a greater tragedy than I can form words to describe.
i’m not judging people who limit their consumption of animal products due to industrialized farming conditions. theyre shit and I would never in my life defend them. i want to burn that whole system down. what I do judge is the complete internalization of exploitation as a fact of our nature. the fact of our nature is that we are incredibly adaptable and collaborative omnivores who live in and rely on a living system of which animals are a HUGE part. we need to cultivate our food to suit our environment and its needs rather than imposing Man As Separate From Nature nonsense on our food system. and what i really am trying to make clear is that there is no division between our food system and our life system. when the land is healthy, the people and the plants and the animals are healthy. the most sustainable diet is a diet tied to your specific environment. if you have winter, importing greens from other places requires either an agreement to only take their excess (in which case you’ll need to rely on your own environment in case they have a shortage) or exploitation and force to take it (in which the people who grew the food starve for the sake of veganism). I live in the plains and i’ll be eating buffalo in the winters instead of cattle if I have anything to say about it.
so to finish up, there IS ethical consumption in capitalism and it is consuming food that you yourself have labored to produce. it is a moral Good to deeply engage with your food and food production and ensure that every being involved in the process—from the land to the plants to the animals to the grower to yourself— is treated with respect, compassion, and dignity. OP who cares for their own chickens and eats the eggs is doing more to actually repair our food system than any strain of vegan thought ever could.
animal husbandry is a reality of human life. we live in environments that cannot produce plant life year-round. committing to eating exclusively plant crops ignores the fact that our food is produced by a living system that requires death and decomposition to cycle nutrients and replenish the land AND requires exploiting areas with longer growing seasons to steal their food. we can make it at home if we’d just care about what the land actually needs.