Before the animal rights movement, the egg was a kind of droll and comic object--used in phrases like "laid an egg" and "egg on my face," and thrown at buildings or public figures. The chicken itself was comic--everyone's favorite synonym for cowardice and for gender stereotypes ("mother hen" and "hen party"). A silly, overprotective bird that lays eggs and can barely fly? What's not to ridicule?
Thanks to hidden cameras, animal welfare activists have shown America "where eggs come from" and it is not a pretty sight. In addition to confinement of an egg hen to less than a filing cabinet's amount of space, egg layers are shockingly disposed of when they are of no use to the industry. Reports of "spent" hens fed alive into a wood chipper hit the news a few years ago. This year 50 million egg laying hens in the US were asphyxiated to reduce famer losses from "bird flu"--risks partially if not completely caused by the factory farm conditions they are kept in!
The same appalling conditions tempt fires and these innocent, sentient animals are regularly burned alive by the thousands. News stories typically report the "shed could not be saved" and the "farmer lost thousands of dollars"--not even mentioning the animals incinerated alive because of factory farmer greed.
This week, food giant McDonald's announced it would use 100 percent cage-free eggs in ten years. It is a game changer which will transform other top food producers, egg producers and the awareness of food consumers themselves. Thank you McDonald's!
But there is another aspect to the egg industry that is less well covered--the grinding up alive of unwanted males at the hatchery, called maceration. Many could not believe that just-hatched, peeping, fluffy male chicks like those given to children at Easter are fed alive into grinders by dispassionate workers at hatcheries until videos surfaced. At the Hy-Line hatchery in Spencer, Iowa 150,000 are ground up alive every day.
Unlike videos of sick caged hens which the egg industry disputes as not the norm, United Egg Producers, the trade group that represents 85 percent of US egg producers and 180 egg farms, confirms the slicing up of newborn males. "There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens," UEP spokesman Mitch Head told the Associated Press when videos of the carnage first hit. "If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need."
Needless to say, if there is "no way" to spare males from death-at-birth, there is no way to make eggs truly "cruelty-free" if they come from a major hatchery.
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