The egg industry, often shrouded in a facade of bucolic farms and happy hens, is one of the most opaque and cruel sectors of animal exploitation. In a world increasingly aware of the harsh realities of carnist ideologies, the egg industry has become adept at hiding the brutal truths behind its operations. Despite the industry’s efforts to maintain a veneer of transparency, the growing vegan movement has begun to peel back the layers of deception.
As Paul McCartney famously noted, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” This sentiment extends beyond slaughterhouses to the grim realities of egg and dairy production facilities. The egg industry, in particular, has invested heavily in propaganda, promoting the idyllic image of “free-range” hens, a narrative even many vegetarians have bought into. However, the truth is far more disturbing.
A recent survey by the UK’s Animal Justice Project revealed a significant lack of public awareness about the egg industry’s cruelty, despite its massive scale and environmental impact. With over 86.3 million metric tons of eggs produced globally in 2021 and 6.6 billion laying hens worldwide, the industry’s blood footprint is staggering. This article aims to expose eight critical facts the egg industry would rather keep hidden, shedding light on the suffering and environmental damage it perpetuates.
The egg industry is one of the cruellest sectors of the animal exploitation industries. Here are eight facts this industry doesn’t want the public to know.
Animal exploitation industries are full of secrets.
In a world where the general population has gradually begun to discover the reality of the carnist ideologies they were indoctrinated into, producing animal products that cause the suffering of others and damage the environment is something that is no longer done with complete transparency. Animal exploiters know that many facts about these industries’ business practices will need to be kept hidden if carnism is to prevail and survive the disruption of a growing vegan movement.
The famous vegetarian Beatle Paul McCartney once said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” However, had he been a vegan, he may have used other examples of farmed animal exploitation facilities, such as the factory farms of the dairy and egg industries.
The egg industry’s propaganda machines have created the false image of “happy free-range hens” strolling around farms and giving “free eggs” to the farmers as if “they don’t need them anymore.” Even many vegetarians, who no longer fall for the lies of the meat industry, believe this deception.
This year, as part of their “Cage-free Isn’t Cruelty-free” campaign, the UK animal rights group Animal Justice Project published the results of a poll they commissioned to YouGov which asked consumers how much they knew about the egg industry. The survey revealed that UK consumers knew very little about the cruelty of this industry but continued to consume eggs regardless.
The egg industry is one of the industries with the highest blood footprint on the planet. The production volume of eggs worldwide exceeded 86.3 million metric tons in 2021, and it has continuously grown since 1990. There are 6.6 billion laying hens worldwide, producing over 1 trillion eggs each year. The average number of egg-laying hens in the US during August 2022 was 371 million. China is the top producer, followed by India, Indonesia, the USA, Brazil, and Mexico.
Given the scale of the egg industry’s cruelty to animals, there are numerous facts it prefers the public not to know. Here are just eight of them.
1. The immense majority of male chicks born in the egg industry are killed soon after hatching
Because male chickens don’t produce eggs, the egg industry does not have any “use” for them, so they are killed soon after hatching as the industry does not want to waste any resources feeding them or giving them any sense of comfort. This means that, as roughly 50% of the chicks hatched from eggs would be male, the global egg industry destroys 6,000,000,000 newborn male chicks every year. This issue is the same for big factory-farmed egg producers or small farms, as no matter with type of farm are we talking about, male chicks would never produce eggs, and they would not be of the breeds used for meat (called broiler chickens).
Male chicks are killed the same day they are born, either by suffocation, gassing or being thrown alive into a high-speed grinder. Shredding millions of live male chicks to death is one of the most common methods to kill male chicks, and even if a few countries have started banning this practice, such as Italy and Germany, it is still common in other places, such as the US.
2. Most hens in the egg industry are kept on factory farms
Around 6 billion hens are farmed globally for the production of almost 1 trillion eggs for human consumption each year, but contrary to what many people think, most of them live on factory farms where their most basic needs are not met. The only thing that matters to the egg industry is higher profits, and the overall welfare of the animals is considered secondary.
Most laying hens in these farms are kept in indoor battery cages. The space given to each bird is less than the size of an A4 piece of paper and the wire floors hurt their feet. In the US, 95%, nearly 300 million birds, are kept in these inhumane facilities. Overcrowded, they’re unable to spread their wings and are forced to urinate and defecate on one another. They are also forced to live with dead or dying hens that are often left to rot.
The size of battery cages where most laying hens are kept in many Western countries varies depending on regulations, but they are generally very small, with a usable space per hen of around 90 square inches. In the US, under the UEP Certified standards, a battery cage system must allow 67 – 86 square inches of usable space per bird.
3. There are no “cage-free” hens kept by the egg industry
All hens and roosters exploited by the egg industry are kept captive against their will in cages of one type or another, even the misleadingly called “free range” hens.
Battery cages for hens came into standard commercial use during the 1940’s and the 1950’s, and today most chickens are still kept in tiny battery cages. However, although several countries have banned the original battery cages for hens, they still allow “enriched” cages that are slightly bigger, but still tiny. The EU, for instance, prohibited classical battery cages in 2012 with the Council of the European Union Directive 1999/74/EC, replacing them with “enriched” or “furnished” cages, offering slightly more space and some nesting materials (for all intents and purposes they are still battery cages but by making them bigger and changing their name, politicians can fool their concerned citizens by claiming they have banned them). Under this directive, enriched cages must be at least 45 centimetres (18 inches) high and must provide each hen with at least 750 square centimetres (116 square inches) of space; 600 square centimetres (93 sq in) of this must be “usable area” – the other 150 square centimetres (23 sq in) is for a nest-box. The UK also enforces similar regulations. The enriched cages now have to provide 600 cm squared useable space per bird, still less than the size of an A4 piece of paper each.
As far as the “free range” chickens are concerned, they are kept in either fenced areas, or big sheds, both of which are still cages. These types of operations may fool consumers into believing that the birds have much more space to roam, but they are kept in such high densities that the available space per bird remains very small. UK regulations require free-range farmed birds to have at least 4 m2 of outside space, and the indoor barn where the birds perch and lay eggs can have up to nine birds per square metre, but this is nothing compared with what a wild chicken (the jungle fowl that still exist in India) will have as its minimum home range.
4. All hens kept by the egg industry have been genetically modified
Domesticated chickens were bred from the jungle fowl in Southeast Asia and spread west towards India, Africa, and eventually to Europe through trade and military conquest. The domestication of chickens began around 8,000 years ago in Asia when humans started to keep them for eggs, meat, and feathers and began applying artificial selection methods that slowly began modifying the genes of the birds until they became domesticated species.
The first significant change in the morphology of domesticated chickens occurred during the medieval period when selective breeding for larger body size and faster growth began in Europe and Asia. By the late mediaeval period, domesticated chickens had at least doubled in body size compared to their wild ancestors. However, it was not until the twentieth century that broiler chickens emerged as a distinct type of chicken bred for meat production. According to Bennett et al. (2018), modern broilers have at least doubled in body size from the late mediaeval period to the present, and have increased up to fivefold in body mass since the mid-twentieth century. After decades of artificial selection, modern broiler chickens have much larger breast muscles, which account for about 25% of their body weight, compared to 15% in the red jungle fowl.
However, the chickens bred for eggs also went through a process of genetic manipulation via artificial selection, but this time not to produce enormous birds, but to increase the number of eggs they could lay. Wild jungle fowl lay eggs for the only purpose of procreation, like most other species, so they will only produce 4-6 eggs in a year (20 at the most). However, genetically modified hens now produce between 300 and 500 eggs a year. All modern hens, even those in free-range farms, are the result of this genetic manipulation.
5. Hens suffer when they produce eggs for the egg industry
Hens laying eggs in the egg industry is not a benign process. It causes suffering to the birds. Firstly, the genetic modifications the industry has made in the animals to force them to produce many more eggs than a wild bird would produce causes them a great deal of body stress, as they need to continue to divert physical resources to keep producing eggs. The unnaturally high rate of egg-laying of the genetically modified hens results in frequent disease and mortality.
Then, stealing an egg from a hen whose instinct is to protect it (she doesn’t know if it is fertile or not) will also cause them distress. Taking their eggs induces the hens to produce more eggs, increasing the body’s stress and psychological distress in a never-ending cycle that has a negative effect that accumulates over time.
And then we have all the additional harmful practices the industry inflicts on laying hens. For instance, practising “forced moulting”, a method to increase “productivity” which changes the lighting conditions and restricts water/food access in certain seasons, generating a lot of stress in the hens.
Also, hens are often “debeaked” (removing the tip of their beaks to prevent them from pecking on each other), usually with a hot blade and no pain relief. This leads to persistent acute pain and often prevents chicks from being able to eat or drink properly.
6. All birds in the egg industry will be killed when they are still young
In modern times, although people may have learnt that most eggs sold to the public are now unfertilised so no chicks can grow for them, there is a higher tally of chicken deaths per egg than in the past, as the egg industry kills all the laying hens after 2-3 years of being forced to produce eggs, and systematically kills all the male chicks (which would be 50% of all the chicks hatched) right after being hatched (as they will not produce eggs when they grow up and are not the type of chicken breed for meat production). Therefore, anyone who avoids eating meat because of considering it to be either a sin, bad Karma, or simply unethical due to being linked to the killing of sentient beings, should also avoid consuming eggs.
In most farms (even free-range ones) hens are slaughtered at just 12 to 18 months of age when their egg production declines, and they are exhausted (often with broken bones due to calcium loss). In the wild, chickens can live up to 15 years, so those killed by the egg industry are still very young.
7. Chicken eggs are not health products
Eggs are extremely high in cholesterol (an average-sized egg contains more than 200 milligrams of cholesterol) and saturated fat (about 60% of the calories in eggs are from fat, much of which is saturated fat) that can clog your arteries and can lead to heart disease. A 2019 study found a significant association between a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and each additional 300 milligrams of cholesterol consumed per day.
A 2021 study in the US showed that eggs may contribute to higher all-cause and cancer mortality as well. It concluded the following: “Intakes of eggs and cholesterol were associated with higher all-cause, CVD, and cancer mortality. The increased mortality associated with egg consumption was largely influenced by cholesterol intake.” This study found that the addition of just half an egg per day was associated with more deaths from heart disease, cancer, and all causes.
Naturally, the egg industry has been trying to suppress all this research and created misleading research trying to hide the truth. However, it’s all been exposed now. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine a review examining all research studies published from 1950 to March 2019 that evaluated the effect of eggs on blood cholesterol levels and examined funding sources and their influence on study findings. They concluded that 49% of industry-funded publications reported conclusions that conflicted with actual study results.
8. The egg industry severely damages the environment
In comparison to industrial production of beef or even broiler chickens, egg production has a smaller climate change footprint, but it’s still high. Scientists from the University of Oviedo, Spain, found the carbon footprint per dozen eggs was 2.7kg of carbon dioxide equivalent, which was described as “a value similar to other basic foods of animal origin such as milk.” A 2014 study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions of the egg industry averaged a global warming potential of 2.2 kg of CO2e/dozen eggs (assuming an average egg weight of 60 g), with 63% of these emissions coming from the hens’ feed. There does not seem to be a significant difference between the cage-free barns and battery cages in terms of their respective environmental impact.
Eggs have been classed as the 9th food with the highest environmental footprint (after the flesh of lambs, cows, cheese, pigs, farmed salmons, turkeys, chickens, and canned tuna fishes). Another study based on the average of a Canadian large-scale free-range farming operation and a New Jersey large-scale confined operation found that one kilogram of eggs produces 4.8 kg of CO2. All vegetables, fungi, algae, and egg substitutes are below that value per kilogram.
We then have the other negative effects in nature, such as the contamination of soil and water. Chicken manure contains phosphates, which become dangerous contaminants when they cannot be absorbed by the land and enter rivers and streams at high levels. Some intensive egg facilities keep as many as 40,000 chickens in just one shed (and have dozens of sheds on one farm), so the run-off from their waste finds its way into nearby rivers, streams and groundwater when it is not properly disposed of.
Don’t be fooled by abusive animal exploiters and their horrible secrets.
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Notice: This content was initially published on VeganFTA.com and may not necessarily reflect the views of the Humane Foundation.
