The Reality of "Egg Production"

At birth the male chicks are sorted form the female chicks. As the male chicks are useless for the egg production and cannot be used for food (because the chickens are special breed for egg production and are not suitable for meat production), they are killed immediately (gassed, suffocated, “shredded” and processed as animal feed or fertilizer).



Their suffering is at least shorter then those of the hens of which 90% end up in laying batteries

This is the space a hen in a laying battery lives on:

Approx. 20 cm x 20 cm of thin wire mesh, inclined so the eggs can role of.
Often the hens legs can’t cope with the stress of standing on this surface all the time. Their legs break.

Their beaks are often truncated, so that are not pecking each other or themselves, because they are extremely stressed. While the chickens bread for meat are often kept in complete darkness, the laying hens are exposed of up to 20 hours of light to stimulate their ovulation.

After 14 month they are “finished” and killed off.

15% don’t live that long and die before in the cages, due to the conditions in which they are kept and illness linked to the over-breeding.

Where the Happy Hens lived

When we used to have chickens at home some visitors asked if we really ate the eggs from those chickens. They wouldn’t have the confidence to do this.

They said they preferred the eggs from the supermarket, because those eggs are checked and stamped.

This is rather twisted thinking, because my grandmother’s hens led a happy live: they had plenty of space to roam, a house for shelter, a rooster and good chicken food like corn and grass. You could really taste the difference in the eggs.

By contrast the reality for most of the hens producing the supermarket eggs is quite different. But for some reason the consumer has totally detached the product they see on the shelf from the reality of food production or they clinch to the advertising images and smooth talk of marketing specialist ofthe food industry, used to gloss over the reality.