Plus: Millions of chickens are scalded alive in huge tanks after neck-cutting, where they flop, scream, kick, break their bones, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads.

Hens Raised to Lay Eggs are:

• painfully debeaked at the hatchery, with no anesthesia.
• typically raised in 50 X 500 ft caged laying hen houses holding 80,000-125,000 hens (99 percent of U.S. laying hens are in cages averaging 8 hens per cage or about 48 to 61 square inches – a hen needs 72 square inches merely to stand comfortably and 290 square inches to flap her wings).
• force molted by food deprivation for up to 2 weeks to manipulate egg
  production.
• suffering from osteoporosis from lack of exercise and inadequate calcium for bone maintenance (hens would normally spend 60 percent of their day foraging for food).
• continuously breathing poisonous ammonia fumes arising from the manure pits beneath their cages.
• suffering from chronic respiratory diseases and untreated wounds and infections without veterinary care or treatment.
• prone to getting their heads and wings caught in the cage bars, resulting in a slow, painful death (the survivors live side by side with rotting corpses of their former cage mates and the only relief they get from standing on wires is standing on these corpses).
• when “spent,” generally put in dumpsters on site to suffocate (or are electrocuted or gassed) to death and then trucked to rendering companies to be turned into “pet” food, livestock/poultry feed and “spent hen” meal.

Plus: Yearly more than 250 million “egg-type” male chicks are suffocated, gassed or ground up alive at the hatchery because they don’t lay eggs and have no commercial value apart from pet food and farmed animal feed.

What About Free-Range Chickens?

Egg-laying hens:

• are debeaked at the hatchery in the same manner as battery-caged hens.
• may be force molted by food deprivation the same as battery-caged hens.
• often have only 1 to 2 square feet of living space per bird, typically living in crowded flocks of 2,000 or more birds (free-range does not solve the problem of oversized flocks and an unstimulating environment).
• are hauled to slaughter after a year or two, the same as battery-caged hens.

Plus: The male chick counterparts of free-range hens are destroyed at the hatchery using the same horrific methods as non-free-range chicks.

And: Although “free-range” chickens raised for meat must have USDA-certified access to the outdoors, environmental quality and space per bird are ignored in the regulations.

Did You Know?

In the United States, 9 billion chickens are slaughtered yearly for food, and worldwide it’s over 50 billion.

• 300 million laying hens are in U.S. agribusiness production each year.
• Chickens are excluded from the Animal Welfare and the Humane Methods of Slaughter Acts.
• The average American consumes 21 chickens per year, compared to approximately one (or part of one) cow or pig.
• Switching from “red meat” to chicken involves the suffering and slaughter of many more animals (it takes many small animals to add up to one large one).

The post Chickens’ Lives – Facing the Unappetizing Facts appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.

In the case of laying hens, these animals are nothing more than expendable egg producing machines that are spent after one or two years. For decades, egg operations that raise their birds in battery cages have been publicly charged with cruelty by some animal advocates. Now that public sentiment is shifting toward food options that are more “natural” and “humane,” some egg producers are taking heed, switching to “cage-free/free-range” methods.

Superficially to the unwary consumer this sounds like a grand improvement, especially to those who have some sympathy for animals. But, what does it really mean for these birds? First, cage-free operations are held to no standards, nor is there a credible inspection system. And what do we find back on the “farm?” We’ve traded thousands of stressed birds crammed into cages in large dark building for thousands of stressed birds crammed into large dark buildings. Actually most cage-free “farms” would more correctly have to be called industrial operations.

That’s not all that is troubling. Cage-free hens and battery hens come from the same hatcheries, where the male birds (hundreds of millions per year) are killed by suffocation or ground up alive at one day old. Like their battery hen counterparts, most cage-free hens are debeaked. And when their production falls (approximately two years) they are sent to the same slaughterhouses or rendering plants.

Egg producers could not afford the costs associated with keeping thousands of spent hens until they died naturally. That could mean providing food, shelter and veterinary care for a decade or longer.

According to Michele Alley-Grubb, cofounder and operator of the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary in Colorado, some of the most egregious cases of animal abuse they have encountered have come from so-called “cage-free” facilities and “family” farms. She’s often asked, “Don’t you think it is still better that people buy cage-free eggs rather than the others if they are going to buy eggs anyway?” Alley-Grubb says, “It is like asking if strangulation is better than suffocation. The answer is: Neither is an acceptable option.”

The tragedy of this new variety of farm animal abuse is compounded by the fact that well-meaning consumers believe they’re making compassionate choices when in fact they’re financially supporting (and helping to perpetuate) inhumane systems. Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary has joined the growing ranks of individuals and activists who are debunking the claims for “humanely” produced animal products.

Alley-Grubb says, “One of the most destructive things we can do for the animals is to lie to ourselves or allow ourselves to be fooled and misinformed into believing that animal agriculture of any kind is humane.”

To learn more about Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary, or to support their efforts, visit:www.peacefulprairiesanctuary.org; or contact: peacefulprairie@netecin.net

The post Cage-Free Eggs – Are They Really a Humane Alternative? appeared first on North American Vegetarian Society.