.:: Eggs Exposed ::.

Battery eggs

In the profitable world of farming, the egg certainly comes before the chicken.

A battery hen starts her life in a hatchery, where fertilised eggs are hatched into chicks. It is here when they are first sorted; for every female chick hatched, a male is hatched too. Since male chicks won’t lay eggs, they are deemed as a mere surplus. At one day old, the chicks are sorted onto conveyor belts and the males are crushed or gassed. Approximately 30 million chicks are killed in the UK each year alone, their bodies carelessly dumped into skips. This is how all laying hens, regardless of whether they will be placed into battery cages or free range facilities, are bred.

The hens destined for battery farming arrive at their new accommodation at just 18 weeks of age. Tens of thousands of birds are kept in large windowless sheds, and forced into cages no bigger than an A4 piece of paper. Law states that a maximum of four birds should go into each 40 x 55 cm sized cage

Investigations carried out by SARC activists have found five birds crammed into a space in which not even one can stretch their wings (see this investigation for more information).

The birds remain in these cages for their entire lives, living in an automatic atmosphere of artificial lighting and ventilation fans. In order to make the hens lay more eggs, lights are kept on for 17 hours a day. The only time they see natural daylight will be a short glimpse as they’re loaded onto a slaughterhouse truck, on their way to becoming soup or dog food.

Chickens naturally enjoy dust-bathing, foraging for food or stretching out in the sun. They are, contrary to what others would have you believe, very intelligent animals with their own social order, friends and preferences. Yet our Animal Welfare laws make it perfectly legal for hens to be crammed into bare wire mesh cages, stacked one on top of the other inside dark, stuffy sheds. The barren conditions, naturally, lead to a whole array of both mental and physical health problems.

Sheer boredom leads hens to peck each other, sometimes even to death, despite having had parts of their beaks sawn off. Some hens are crushed to death in the tiny space, and are often left rotting in the botton of the cage. Others become crippled by the bare mesh floor, their legs brittle and weak from lack of daylight, exercise and adequate food. Disease is also fairly commonplace inside battery farms. Infectious bronchitis, cage layer fatigue, leukosis and egg peritonitis are just some of the diseases which are prominanent in many farms. The overly-intensive, cramped and unclean conditions means that such problems spread all too easily.

In order to combat these problems, birds are pumped with antibiotics and drugs to stop too many dying. Drugs which end up, in small traces, into the eggs you eat.

The only reason that this farming continues is because there is a demand for cheap eggs, and cheap products that contain egg. It is people buying these products - you, the consumer - that means this carries on. The egg industry has a market value of £568million... because people are buying this product of cruelty.

Battery eggs are labelled as "eggs from caged hens", "farm fresh eggs", "fresh eggs" or "value eggs" in supermarkets. Because of the blantant cruelty of this production method, the packaging will normally be vague and avoidant of it's origin. If in doubt, just don't buy the product!

You can help stop this by thinking before you purchase items on your next shop. Click here to find out more!

Barn Eggs

Barn egg production is a definite improvement upon the battery system, although the name is, unsurprisingly, quite misleading. Rather than the spacious, straw-filled barns one might expect, barn eggs are simple sheds which contain a few perches and feed dispensers. They too are windowless, stuffy and mentally deprivating. While the birds are not caged, they are still confined to an artificial life without the light of day, fresh air or the opportunity to forage for food.

Overcrowing is evident, with some barns containing 16,000 hens at once. In order to combat the crowded conditions, the hens have been de-beaked. Bullying and feather plucking still continue, however, as the hens argue for the little space they have.

Such eggs are labelled as "Barn Eggs" in supermarkets.

Free Range Eggs

Is free range the solution? You would think so, yes. Yet recent investigations have found scandalous revelations when it comes to supposedly “free range” egg farming. Furthermore, everything discovered was perfectly legal under the Welfare of Farmed Animals Act (2000).

In January 2006, SARC activists were involved in the legal rescue of over 3000 free range hens from an egg production unit. Rather than the sight of happy chickens roaming the landscape, they were met with several large, windowless sheds.

Unlike battery units, the hens weren't caged. Instead they were free to roam - upon a suspended wire mesh floor, amongst 12,000 other birds. The area is suspended above a large pit, where a huge build-up of excrement forms. The barns were dark, hot and the air was thick with the burning smell of ammonia and animal waste. The hens were overcrowded and all in extremely poor condition - suffering from feather loss, ammonia burns, and crippled feet from the crude flooring. Some birds were nearly entirely bald, and several needed urgent veterinary attention.

This facility was, and is, a perfectly legal example of free range egg farming. The requirements to deem it as such were that the birds must have room to move and have access to outside. Eventually, a tiny run was located on the side of the shed, which was only big enough to allow a few birds out at a time. At this point, the farmer pointed out that actually the doorway to the run gets guarded by dominant hens, and pretty much none of the birds in the facility actually do get to go out.

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