This may be repetative to most of you, but I just saw this info again on MySpace and am so angry at the way these chickens are treated that I had to repost in case this is new news for anyone reading. Please do not buy into the "free range" and "cage free" marketing tricks. Take a look:

The Reality of "Free-Range" Eggs

There are very few places that have truly free-range eggs. If a farm produces enough to package their eggs and put them on a store shelf you can be fairly certain they are not a small farm. A small farm would have fewer then 100 hens. Once hens number over 100 or so they are unable to establish a pecking order so they fight constantly. When that happens the farm usually cuts off the hens' beaks, their primary weapon, with a hot knife [see picture below], a very painful and crippling procedure. The beaks do not grow back and the pain and mutilation from de-beaking [see picture below] causes many hens not to be able to eat or drink, resulting in death from starving or dehydration. Fewer hens die from de-beaking then would die from the stress induced fighting so the industry looks at de-beaking as a money saving procedure. The majority of "free-range" eggs come from de-beaked hens.



If a small farm gets a lot of support and they do well they often intensify their production and therefore are no longer a small farm. Also, realize that only females lay eggs, so any farm that has layers has either killed or sold off the males (if they hatch their own eggs). It is more likely, however, that the farm bought their hens from a hatchery. All hatcheries that hatch egg laying hens kill the males at a few days of age [see picture below], or, as investigators have repeatedly discovered, they dump the male chicks in a dumpster alive [see picture below]. Males do not lay eggs and are of the wrong stock to be profitable for meat production.




Once a hen is no longer producing profitably she will killed. Most free-range hens, like chickens killed for meat and all other hens no longer profitable for egg production, are transported to the slaughterhouse crammed into small cages on the back of a semi truck [see picture below]. They are hung upside down and have their throats slit [see picture below]. If a hen misses the whirling blades that are intended to cut her throat, she will be scalded to death in the feather removal tank. There are, I am sure, small family farms that have a dozen or so chickens that do not kill the hens, but those farms barely produce enough eggs for themselves and perhaps a few neighbors. If you find a farm like that then I will not take the effort to dissuade you from eating those eggs - that is if you do not care that eggs have three times the cholesterol your body can excrete in a day, meaning 200 mg of the 300 mg of cholesterol in the egg sticks in your arteries.

(aaaaa! I cannot show the other photos here... please look it up on the Web though to find out more.)

Just a reminder to please research what you are paying for. Most people wonder why we do not eat eggs or dairy and cannot see the cruelty that goes on behind the scenes. Once you see the chicks pushed by the hundreds down conveyor belts, tossed around and sent to the grinders or dumpsters, you'll no longer want to support eating meat, dairy or eggs either. Think about *their* lives. Can we live without that kind of violence? Of course.


More information:
What's Wrong With Dairy and Eggs?
The "Free-Range" Myth