________________
inseminated by a male chicken; in this case, the egg does not contain the embryo of a young chicken. However, when we use unfertilized eggs, we are still committing stealing what belongs to another creature. Additionally, we are keeping the hens in a kind of permanent slavery to harvest their eggs, and so consume what they produce in suffering.
The Incredible, Inedible Egg: FOOTPRINTS OF HIMSA.
On factory egg farms, egg laying hens are housed in intensive confinement buildings where up to 100,000 birds are crammed into a single warehouse in stacked rows of bare wire cells called "battery cages." Four to six laying hens are crowded into each cage, each of about the size of a folded newspaper, unable to stretch their wings, walk, or even roost. Because of this inability, hens' feet frequently grow directly around the bare wire of their cages.
To reduce stress-induced pecking and fighting resulting from over-crowding, the hens' beaks are painfully severed at the tip. This delicate tissue is amputated without the use of anesthesia, using a hot knife or a crude guillotine-like device. De-beaking causes excruciating pain and severe shock and frequently results in death.
Hens are also forced to undergo a production process known as "forced molting." This common egg industry practice involves denying the birds' food and water for days on end in order to shock their systems into another egg laying cycle. Ultimately, this destroys a hen's immune system and greatly increases the risk of salmonella contamination of her eggs.
A hen in a natural environment might live to be fifteen to twenty years old, In contrast, a factory hen, at the age of just eighteen months, when she is no longer capable of producing eggs at the rate required to be lucrative for the business, like her sister the dairy cow, will meet her demise in the abyss of the slaughterhouse. Here she will be ground into pet food or boiled for chicken soup.
122
An Ahimsa Crisis: You Decide
