Just in case you haven’t heard yet, chickens lay eggs and humans tend to eat those eggs. However, there are a few things you should know before ordering your next scramble.
1. Chicken Periods?
Eggs aren’t quite a hen’s period, but they are pretty close. Naturally, hens go through a cycle once or twice a month where the ovary sends a yolk through the reproductive tract (along the way it develops the white) into the shell gland. After about twenty hours, the hen lays this egg. This is supposed to (anatomically) happen once or twice a month. However, humans have specifically bred hens used for their eggs to do this as often as once a day. As you can imagine this is not natural for a hen and if they are allowed to live past 18 months (which is the age at which most hens are gassed or suffocated because their egg production has decreased) they can develop reproductive diseases and cancers due to this genetic modification.
So to recap: eggs are unfertilized ova; humans have genetically forced them to ovulate more than 100 times as often as they should resulting in painful diseases; and humans kill the hens when they lay fewer than they deem is profitable. To find out more about this process visit Free From Harm.
2. Not Nutritious, Healthy, or Safe (Legally!)
The American Egg Board (overseen by the USDA), the ones who monitor how egg companies advertise their eggs, have told companies they couldn’t promote eggs as “naturally nutritious” because, “Nutritious and healthy carry certain connotations, and because eggs have the amount of cholesterol they do, plus the fact that they’re not low in fat, these words are problematic.”
They have also put the kibosh on companies simply calling them healthy by stating they, “Can’t use the word ‘healthy’ because of the amount of cholesterol (risk-increasing nutrient) in eggs.” So because you can’t say eggs are a healthy start to the day, the USDA suggested, “instead of ‘healthy,’ suggest great, satisfying, perfect, etc.”
Lastly, the USDA dictates that egg advertisements cannot include the word “safe.” They can’t call them safe, safe to eat or even reference safety. This is due to the hundreds of thousands of illnesses caused by eggs each year (avian influenza and salmonella).
These few interactions prove a few things: Eggs are not legally nutritious, healthy, or safe and the egg companies all seem to forget this when trying to advertise. Thanks, USDA, for having our backs on this one!
3. Salmonella
If you think swimming with sharks is dangerous, look out for those eggs because five times as many people die each year from eating eggs than people do from shark attacks. The USDA estimates that thirty people die each year from contracting salmonella by consuming eggs, whereas only 6 people die from shark attacks each year (on average according to the International Shark Attack File). In addition to deaths, the USDA estimates about 79,000 cases of food borne illnesses caused by eating contaminated eggs. I’ll take a day at the beach over a sunny side up breakfast any day.
4. Battery Cages
A lot of people think it’s no big deal to eat eggs because hens will lay them whether we want to eat them or not. While this is true, farmers don’t just go out into a grassy field and gently take a fresh egg away from a hen basking in the sun with the wind blowing through her feathers. As it turns out 95% of all hens used for their eggs reside in what are called battery cages.
Battery cages are wire cages stacked up inside an industrial barn. Each cage is about the size of a piece of paper and houses four to six hens. They are packed in so tightly that they cannot even open their wings. Forced to live in severe confinement, unable to do anything a chicken would naturally do, such as peck at the ground, flap their wings, dust bathe or even walk on solid ground, many chickens literally go insane. Because of this, they have a tendency to peck at each other, a problem which farmers solve by cutting off the tips of their beaks.
These hens are forced to live in these conditions day in and day out. This is where they eat, where they sleep, where they pee and poop and for many, where they die, left to decompose among their still living sisters. If they don’t die in the cages they are “depopulated” after about 18 to 24 months, when their egg production dips below what is considered profitable. Farmers tend to depopulate (gas or suffocate less profitable birds) about two or three times a year. Each time killing as many as 60,000 hens at a time.
The only time the cages and barn are only cleaned out is during depopulation, which means that the urine and feces that collects directly below and throughout all the cages where the girls live, stays there as long as the birds do.
Sadly, this is where our eggs come from. Is a scrambled breakfast really worth this kind of suffering?
5. Bye Bye Baby Boys
In the poultry industry there are two types of chickens: hens used for their eggs and chickens raised for meat. Chickens raised for meat are genetically bred to be bigger, heavier and grow more quickly as to be more profitable. Hens used for their eggs can obviously only be female. So what happens to the boys born into the egg industry? They are not the big bulky chickens that can be slaughtered for meat and they can’t produce eggs so they are of no use to anyone. Which means they are either ground up alive or suffocated in garbage bags when they are only a few days old. More than 100 million baby boy chickens are killed this way each year according to Peta.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to the industry than is allowed to meet the eye. Just some food for thought, please eat critically!