BY SOFO ARCHON
People like to eat eggs, but most of them don’t know how they’re produced.
Do you? If not, then let me tell you.
Nearly all eggs being bought and sold in the market come from the egg industry — an industry that sees chickens merely as egg-producing machines, and exploits tens of billions of them each year for one and only purpose: to sell their eggs and make profit. And the way it achieves that is… horrifying.
Here’s what the process of industrial egg production looks like:
When they are hatched, male and female chicks are separated. Right afterward, all male chicks are killed, usually by being ground up alive, gassed or thrown into plastic bags where they’re left to suffocate. Why? Because the egg industry considers male chicks “worthless”, since they don’t lay eggs and are a different breed from chickens raised for meat.
But female chicks have it much worse: Once they grow up, they are usually placed in huge barns where they have to live with tens of thousands of other chickens, confined in tiny cages where they step and lie on excrement. Living in such filthy conditions, many of them get sick and die. To minimize disease and deaths, the egg industry regularly pumps hens with antibiotics.
For the rest of their lives, hens have their eggs constantly stolen. In their natural state, they only lay eggs until they have a full nest, but by removing their eggs, this natural process is interrupted, and so they feel the instinctual urge to lay more of them in order to fill their nest. This is not only exhausting for them, but also damaging to their health, since constant egg production depletes the hens of calcium and other vital nutrients, causing osteoporosis and many other painful conditions.
Because of the continuous pressure their laying organs have to endure, some hens even die in the process. Those who don’t, are day in, day out exploited and abused for their eggs. But their life doesn’t last for long: Once their production wanes, they all end up in the slaughterhouse, where they have their throats slit. This usually happens when they are just about 18 months old, while in natural conditions, chickens live for about 8 years.
This is the truth about the egg industry — a truth that most people don’t know about, because it has been intentionally hidden from us. If you didn’t know, now you do, and this allows you to make better-informed decisions — that is, decisions that can help put an end to the egg industry, such as saying no to the consumption of its products and raising awareness about the unbelievable cruelty caused by it.