How does eating eggs harm chickens?
Female chickens raised to lay eggs on factory farms live their entire lives in wire cages stacked upon one another. They are packed so tightly together that each hen has only a space about the size of a standard sheet of paper, not even enough room to lift her wings. Confined tightly their entire lives, the chickens often lose most of their feathers rubbing against the wire cage walls. Debeaking – in which part of the chickens’ sensitive beaks are seared off with a hot blade to prevent them from pecking their cagemates to death in the overcrowded cages – is a common practice on factory farms. Battery hens—those raised for eggs—are genetically bred so that each produces approximately 300 eggs per year – about 10 times as much as they naturally would. Yet these devoted mothers never get to raise a single chick. Upon hatching, male and female chicks are separated out. The females are raised in incubators to replace their mothers, and the males are quickly disposed of because they cannot l
