Commercially produced free-range eggs come at a terrible price

Many people defend their consumption of eggs by claiming they only buy free-range.   But the premium price they pay includes the maceration of billions of baby roosters every year.  End Animal Slaughter guest contributor JOY ANN SATCHELL explains why.

 

 

So many people defend their consumption of eggs by claiming they only buy free range. Do they have any idea where the free range laying hens come from?

Laying hens, such as Brown Shavers, a favourite in the egg industry, are kept penned up in hatching facilities, laying eggs day every day.  The point of difference between them and their egg-laying sisters in factory farms is that their eggs are fertile. Just like their sisters, their eggs are taken from them, so they keep on laying.

These eggs are destined not for eating by humans, but for incubation.   They are placed in huge incubators clinically kept at the right temperature, providing optimum conditions for the little chicks to grow.   For these babies there is no sitting beneath their sweet mother, listening to her clucking through their fragile shell.

For these babies there is no sitting beneath their sweet mother, listening to her clucking through their fragile shell.

A few days before hatching their doom is upon them.   They are transferred to hatching baskets, and once they emerge, they go through a sorting process carried out by people standing either side of a conveyor belt, trained to identify the sex of the chick, and then the male chicks are separated from female chicks.

Female chicks are placed into plastic crates and are sent immediately to another farm, one which will feed them until they are old enough to start laying. Then they are sent off to their next home, free range or not, as the case may be. They then spend the next year or so as egg-laying slaves. Then exhausted, spent, they are sent to slaughter.

What about the wee day old male chicks though?   They are an unwanted by-product, so their doom is to be suffocated immediately, or as this photo depicts, fed live into a grinder.   This is, by the way, an SPCA-approved method of disposal.

I think one of the saddest things I have ever seen is the little male chick, spreading his day-old wings in a futile attempt to fly.

I think one of the saddest things I have ever seen is the little male chick, spreading his day-old wings in a futile attempt to fly.

If you consume eggs, this is what you support.    Eggs are laid at a tremendous cost of suffering, cruelty and slaughter.

Go Vegan.