Don’t lie to yourself: “Backyard eggs” come from suffering and violence.
An Egg Production Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM David Jack James
Facebook posting, May 20, 2021

When we stop contributing to these harmful industries, we are sending a very powerful message to everyone: HUMANS DO NOT NEED TO USE OR CONSUME ANIMALS OR THEIR BODILY SECRETIONS FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.

backyard eggs

Don’t lie to yourself: “Backyard eggs” come from suffering and violence. Some people assume that “backyard eggs” are “cruelty-free” because they can see that the hens are cared for, but if you think about it logically, those hens came from somewhere, and they definitely had brothers, who of course can’t lay eggs. Chickens give birth to males and females the same as all animals, at a ratio of about 50/50. What happened to the brothers of these hens?

“Backyard egg” sellers can’t afford to hatch their own chicks in incubators, and they can’t profit from the male chicks anyway. Why would they take care of them if they can’t profit from them? They purchase hens from the same hatcheries as the factory farms, where the male chicks are slaughtered. These babies are hatched in incubators and never come close to their mothers.

At these hatcheries, male chicks are sorted out and killed by being ground up alive, gassed, or left to suffocate in garbage bags and dumpsters. What a horrible, prolonged way to die. If you don’t believe that “backyard egg” sellers purchase these hens from these same hatcheries, then ask them where the male chickens are.

Remember that “backyard egg” sellers are motivated by money. A common practice for these sellers is to order the female chicks to be shipped to them in the mail from the hatcheries. These babies are shipped without food, water, or any protection, in cardboard boxes for days. In some cases, male chicks are used as packing material for the financially valuable female chicks in the delivery boxes, and then they are tossed in the trash when the shipment arrives. The next time you purchase “backyard eggs,” ask the sellers how they obtain their egg-laying hens. If they claim to hatch the chicks themselves, then ask to see their hatchery, as well as the mother hens and the roosters. They won’t be able to show them to you because they don’t exist .

Also ask the sellers what happens to the hens when they stop laying eggs at a profitable rate. When the hens stop producing eggs efficiently, of course they are sold to be slaughtered for meat, after about two years or when the hen can no longer lay enough eggs to be profitable. When you fund “backyard egg” operations, you are also funding the meat industry. Even if the hens are allowed to live after they no longer lay eggs, and they die of natural causes (which is rarely the case), the sellers will still need to purchase more hens from the hatcheries so that they will have more hens to exploit for profit. And the cycle continues.

A common misconception is that chickens are always just naturally “giving” eggs to humans. Today’s egg-laying hens have been intensively bred to lay between 250 to 300 eggs per year. These hens who lay “backyard eggs” are the same hens whose bodies have been selectively bred and genetically tampered with so that they lay as many as 10 times more eggs than their bodies are designed to lay. In the wild, chickens, like all birds, lay only during breeding season (primarily in the spring) and they lay only enough eggs to ensure the natural survival of their genes. When humans interfere with the natural process of a hen protecting and nesting with her eggs, by constantly taking them away from her, her body instinctively responds by producing more eggs!
Furthermore, in nature, a hen would eat the shells of her own unfertilized eggs (which are made of calcium carbonate) in order to replenish calcium and other nutrients that are leeched from her body as a result of constant, labor-intensive egg production. Every time a hen produces an egg shell, she must mobilize approximately 10% of the calcium stored in her bones. Because the incessant production of an abnormal quantity of eggs depletes their bodies of massive amounts of calcium, and because their eggs are taken from them so that they cannot restore their decreased calcium, most of these hens suffer from debilitating, painful osteoporosis.

Even if hens producing “backyard eggs” are treated with kindness and respect, humans are still taking something that doesn’t belong to them, and doing so perpetuates the mentality that animals are here for humans to treat as property and to exploit for their bodily secretions. In a world that already uses and enslaves animals and harvests their bodies for profit, supporting “backyard egg” operations continues this abusive and unethical status quo. It is pure egotism to think that we have the right to devalue and disregard other conscious, sentient beings just to fulfill our own selfish desires, which in this case, all revolve around convenience, tradition, habit, and taste pleasure. “Backyard egg” sellers may not be harming those individual chickens directly, but they ARE harming all chickens everywhere, by normalizing the exploitation of chickens and the consumption of their eggs.

As consumers, our most significant act to help animals is to boycott all of these barbaric industries, thus ending our consumption of ALL animal products. This is the only way that we can ensure that animals will be treated fairly, with genuine kindness and respect, because there is no practical way to monitor each and every situation.

When we stop contributing to these harmful industries, we are sending a very powerful message to everyone: HUMANS DO NOT NEED TO USE OR CONSUME ANIMALS OR THEIR BODILY SECRETIONS FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER.


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