The Egg Industry Kills Chicks

Would you kill those two chicks above so that you could eat an omelet? Would you grind them up in a blender or throw them into a chipper/shredder so that you could eat fried eggs? Would you toss them into a plastic garbage bag and seal it up so that you could have some scrambled eggs? Would you toss them into a dumpster so that you could eat a hard-boiled egg? No? Well, if you are buying and/or eating commercial eggs, that is exactly what you are doing!

No, you are not the person who is physically tossing these tiny little animals into the shredder or garbage bag, but when you give your money to the egg industry, you are simply paying someone else to do this dirty work for you. In other words, with your money you sanction this cruelty and allow it to continue.

If you paid someone to kill another person on your behalf but did not do the actual killing yourself, you are guilty of the crime nonetheless. If you paid a company to renovate your house, knowing that one of the workers would die in the process due to unsafe conditions, you would be guilty of that person's death (even though you did not order them to be killed directly). So if you know that chicks are being killed as a result of your buying eggs and you continue to buy eggs, you are morally responsible for the death of those chicks.

As I note on my webpage about Eggs, "Male chicks will never lay eggs and are not the breed used for meat. Therefore, since they are worthless to the egg industry, these baby chicks are disposed of like trash—either suffocated to death in garbage bags and dumpsters or ground up alive in large industrial macerators. Over 300 million newborn male chicks are killed each year in the United States."

Do you think I am making this up? Would you like to see some photos?

Or maybe you would prefer a short video or two?

Both of these are quite graphic (viewer discretion is advised):

If you can look at those photos and videos and you are still willing to buy and eat eggs, then there probably isn't anything that will convince you otherwise (except possibly killing chicks in a hatchery yourself).

As for me, when I first heard about chick culling (as it is euphemistically called by the Egg Industry) and first saw photos and videos of the practice, I was sickened and horrified. And I have never eaten an egg again, nor do I ever plan to.

There is a new technology called "in-ovo sexing." According to Mercy For Animals, who has tried to draw attention to chick culling for more than a decade, "In-ovo sexing, enables egg producers to identify male embryos inside the eggshells. Through this technology, eggs that would hatch males can be destroyed before the embryos develop into chicks who can feel pain...After talks with Mercy For Animals, major commercial egg producer Kipster [became] the first U.S. egg company to adopt in-ovo sexing." You can read more about this development here. Even though it is only just beginning to become available in select markets in the U.S., it is certainly good news—at least for the 300 million male chicks killed each year.

However, even with this positive development, egg-laying hens still live in miserable conditions and have very short lives. As Mercy For Animals says, "With over eight billion chickens slaughtered per year for food in the U.S., they are arguably the most abused animals on the planet." Consider these facts:

• Female chicks are painfully "debeaked," as workers cut off up to half of their sensitive beaks without any painkillers.

• Over 75% of egg-laying hens in the U.S. are packed tightly into wire cages with 8 - 9 other hens. The cages are kept in giant sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 hens. Each hen has less living space on average than a standard piece of printer paper for their entire lives! (The terms Cage-free, Free-range, and Pasture-raised can be thought of as lesser tiers of cruelty, but I won't go into the details here.)

• In the wild, hens only lay eggs during breeding season, totaling just 10-15 eggs per year. But due to selective breeding, egg-industry hens lay 250-300 eggs per year, which takes a never-ending toll on their bodies (and often leading to Uterine Prolapse, where a hen's uterus pushes out through the vent area leading to painful infection and a slow, agonizing death).

• In the wild, chickens can live 8-15 years. In the egg industry, the majority of hens are killed after only 12-18 months due to declining egg production.

• Chickens are not protected by the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, so spent laying hens are electrocuted, suffocated, buried alive, gassed, or simply chopped to pieces by wood-chipper blades (shredded into human food, pet food, and poultry feed).

Thus, the only way to truly stop all this suffering is to stop eating eggs. In other words, become Morally Vegan for the animals.

To learn more about the egg industry and egg-laying hens, check out the egg page here.

Mahalo for reading. Aloha...