The eggs we buy in the supermarket are sterile and not unborn fetuses.” This is true, but the real cruelty of egg production lies in the treatment of the “laying hens” themselves, who are perhaps the most abused of all factory-farmed animals.
Each egg from today’s factory farms represents 22 hours of misery for a hen packed in a cage the size of a filing cabinet drawer with up to five other chickens. Cages are stacked many tiers high, and feces from cages above fall onto the chickens below.
Hens become lame and develop osteoporosis from forced immobility and calcium lost to produce eggshells. Some birds’ feet grow around the wire cage floors; they starve to death because they are unable to reach the food trough. At just two years old, most hens are “spent” and they are sent to the slaughterhouse. Egg-laying hatcheries don’t have any use for male chicks; they are killed by suffocation, decapitation, crushing, or are ground up alive.
