Maybe you too have felt as confused as a chameleon in a bag of Skittles when purchasing eggs sometimes. Egg labeling today doesn’t make it very easy for shoppers to shop eggs, that’s for certain. You’ve got all these esthetic terms printed on egg cartons, making you think your eggs came from healthy, happy-raised chickens that lived a fulfilling country life.
But for over 90% of all egg-laying hens in America, the sun rarely shines through the wire cages where they are kept their entire lives and forced to produce eggs. More than 90% of laying hens live their entire life in cages.
And that’s the pretty sight of caged hens. Most of the facilities raising chickens for eggs provide minimum to no space at all for birds to be able to perform their normal behaviors. And not only are they deprived of sunlight, space and natural behaviors, chickens, are inflicted aggressive operations so they can “perform” better.
Crammed in a very small space, chickens and stressed, unable to adapt to the barren conditions of battery cages. They have no place to retire to lay their eggs except the space they are confined to along with other chickens. Because cages are stacked on top of one another, urine and feces fall onto birds from the lower levels. Hens are sometimes starved to force them into laying eggs. And to prevent hens from pecking each other as a result of stressful confinement, farmers cut off the bird’s beak, a process often deemed “less painful than a tongue piercing” by farming corporations.
Farming corporations will also try to convince the public that battery cages actually protect the birds – from common diseases and predators, propagating the idea that chickens are safe from environmental risks.
But the reality is different, and the reality is that chickens are used for eggs to maximize profit. In 1 to about 2 years, chickens start producing fewer eggs, which is when they are sent to slaughter to make room for female chicks that yield more eggs. By the time this happens, birds have already suffered from mutilation and confinement to the point of exhaustion. The industry calls it “cage fatigue.”
Why any of this matters
Chickens are intelligent and social earthlings despite common belief. Baby chicks look to their mother to guide them, and mother hens were found to teach chicks things like avoiding certain food.
Chickens can also recognize human faces and communicate with over 30 unique voices with different meaning. A specific sound, for example, alerts other chickens on predators while baby chicks’ purring sounds let the mother hen know her babies are comfortable.
Denying chickens of these natural environments and behaviors is unnatural and inhumane. Public opposition to keeping chickens in battery cages has determined farms to switch to cage-free facilities or the so-called free range systems. But it’s all the same: “free-range” is nothing but a marketing ploy. Chickens can be given access outdoors for only as little as five minutes and still get qualified as free range. And there are no criteria to establish the quality of that space and time. “Outdoors” in some factory farming is a gravel yard where vegetation stopped growing a long time ago.