Around 95% of commercially
available eggs come from egg factories, where the birds are held in “battery
cages,” 14 inch wire cages which hold five to eight birds. To prevent
aggression due to the stress of such unnatural living conditions, chicks are
de-beaked, which is a euphemistic way of saying their beaks are seared off
without any anesthesia. The cages extend from one end of the barn to the other
and are stacked on top of one another so that the birds on all but the top row
are constantly showered with urine and feces from the other birds.
To boost egg production on the
modern farm, hens often undergo a process known as forced molting. Molting
refers to the process whereby a hen loses all of her feathers and grows new
feathers. In nature this happens once a year usually during the fall so the hen
will have new full plumage to keep her warm through the winter. While molting,
she stops laying eggs as her body directs most of its energy to growing the new
feathers. On factory farms, hens are manipulated into molting on a planned schedule
that increases profit. Forced molting means the molt will be shorter and the
hens will continue to lay eggs when market egg prices are highest. This is
achieved through starvation. Typical starvation periods are between five
to fourteen days. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture there are
over 6 million hens in the U.S. who are being systematically starved in their
cages at any given time.[2]
The dirtiest secret of the egg
industry is what happens to the male chicks. All egg laying hens, whether
they are on a large scale commercial industrialized farm (a.k.a factory farm)
or an organic, free range, “humane” farm, or even backyard chickens, all come
from a hatchery. The hatchery is where egg layers are produced. The chickens
who are raised for meat (“broilers”) are selectively bred to produce as much
meat as possible. Egg layers are not. Therefore animal agriculture has manipulated
two entirely different breeds of chicken, one for laying eggs and one for
meat consumption.
As soon
as chicks hatch, they are immediately “sexed.” That is, a worker at the
hatchery checks the sex of the chick. If that chick is female, she becomes a layer.
But a male born to the egg industry cannot be used for meat, (he’s not been
bred to fatten up enough) and is equally useless to the egg industry because he
can’t produce eggs. So, if that chick is a male, point blank, he is killed.
260
million male chicks are killed at egg hatcheries in the US every year. The
most common industry methods for killing them are maceration, which means they
are ground up alive in large machines, and gassing.
All
hatcheries kill the males. The egg industry could not stay in business any
other way.
[1] Theodore
Xenophon Barber, Scientific Evidence that Birds are Aware, Intelligent, and
Astonishingly Like Humans: Implications and Future Research Directions
[2] “Forced
Molting”, United Poultry Concerns, 2010, http://www.upc-online.org/molting/
