The egg industry is a very cruel place! Knowing that all of these horrible things that the chickens are put through are unnecessary, makes it even worse looking at it from an ethical point of view. People tend to think that eating eggs doesn't cause any harm to the chickens, but it does. To the egg industry male chicks are useless, they are a byproduct. This means that as soon as they are born they are thrown into massive, industrial grinders and they literally get grounded up alive. This is the most commonly used method, but there are other cruel practices some chicken farms use, like drowning them or gassing the new born male chicks with CO2.
As you can imagine being genetically modified to produce 300 eggs a year, instead of 10-15 has a massive negative impact on these chickens. They have a hard time moving, if they even have the space to do so. These chickens are under a lot of stress that they have no way of coping with, so developing diseases or organ failure is very common. To prevent these chickens from causing harm to each other, their beaks are cut off with a hot blade, without any pain killers being given to them. If you eat eggs, you are paying for murder and unnecessary cruelty.
It is important to keep in mind that the only time these chickens get to see day light and experience the sun, is when they are being transported to the slaughterhouse. Once they are not useful to the farms and industry anymore, meaning that when they don't produce as many eggs as the industry workers want them to, the chickens are sent to the slaughterhouse. However, there's more because their suffering doesn't end there! In the slaughterhouse they get hung upside down and have their throats slit. Those hens who survive this are boiled alive!
This happens in every farm, no matter what the label. Be it free range or cage free, its doesn't stop the things that are behind it. I said this before, but I'll say it again, a label doesn't make any difference in terms of what happens to the animals.
What about backyard eggs? You might wonder why vegans don't eat backyard eggs, what's the problem with that? The reason being is that most of the time people keep chickens only to take their eggs. People view animals and in this case chickens as a resource, not as the individuals they actually are. In the process of pushing the eggs out there can occur multiple complications because of the unnatural amount of eggs these chickens have been bred to produce. They also lose nutrients during this process, such as calcium. So sometimes you can see these backyard chickens that have been 'rescued' from the egg industry or anywhere else, eat their own eggs as a way of gaining back the nutrients they lost. This of course isn't profitable so before this could happen 'the owners' often take the eggs away as they only keep the hens so they can have their eggs. You as a human don't need to eat chicken periods to survive and thrive, if you feed the egg back to the chicken it can help them be healthy! They are individuals not a source of exploitation and resource!
Now let's talk about the health aspects of eating eggs. I recommend you watch the documentary called What the health and Gamechangers, if you are interested in educating yourself about this more! Everyone talks about how high cholesterol isn't good, but did you know that one egg has 207 milligrams of cholesterol? Eating eggs is bad for your heart as it can seriously mess with your arteries and cause heart attacks or various heart diseases along with other health problems.
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