Chickens for Eggs
Despite the common belief that drinking milk or eating eggs does not kill animals, commercially-raised dairy cows and egg-laying chickens, whether factory-farmed or “free range,” are slaughtered when their production rates decline. The same factory farm methods that are used to produce most meats are also used to produce most milk and eggs — only worse.
On U.S. farms, an average of 5 – 6 egg-laying hens spend their entire lives in a battery cage with a floor area the size of a file drawer. These chickens live on wire floors that deform their feet, in cages so tiny they cannot stretch their wings, and are covered with excrement from cages above them. Lameness, bone disease, and obsessive pecking are common. Pecking is curbed by searing the beaks off young chicks. Although chickens can live up to 15 years, they are usually slaughtered when their egg production rates decline after two years. Hatcheries have no use for male chicks, so they are killed by suffocation, decapitation, gassing, or crushing.
The Virtual Battery Cage below was created to help visualize the extreme and unnecessary intensive confinement from the perspective of one of its victims.
