VIDEO: Egg Facts the Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

There are plenty of things that the egg industry tries to keep hidden, not wanting the public to find out.

You probably don’t even think about eggs that much.

I mean, you just go to the supermarket and buy them, not putting much thought into it.

But there is so much information you probably don’t know, but would want to about the egg industry!

According to USA Return, there is a common misconception that free range eggs involve hens roaming outside, happy and free. Yet the reality is that free range hens are actually kept in vast sheds with potentially thousands of other birds, few of which ever see daylight.

Free range might mean cage-free, but EU legislation stipulates that as many as nine birds can occupy one square metre of floor space. Provided the bird-to-floor ratio is met, these laws do not stop chickens being stacked tier upon tier. They must be given some kind of outside access, but in such confined spaces only few birds are ever able to actually make it outside.

Standard free range practice is to cut off a large portion of each hen’s beak with a hot blade without the use of painkillers so that hens in close confinement don’t peck each other.

A hen’s beak is very sensitive, akin to a human’s fingertips. Research suggests that beak trimming leads to both acute and chronic pain with symptoms similar to those of human amputees who suffer from phantom limb pain.

All commercial hens are sent to slaughter after around one year’s egg production despite having a natural life span of seven years. They mostly end up in processed meats, typically pet food. ‘Breeders’, the hens required to produce the next generations of egg-layers, are similarly slaughtered after one year due to exhaustion.

According to Wikipedia, commercial factory farming operations often involve raising the hens in small, crowded cages, preventing the chickens from engaging in natural behaviors, such as wing-flapping, dust-bathing, scratching, pecking, perching, and nest-building. Such restrictions can lead to pacing and escape behavior.

Many hens confined to battery cages, and some raised in cage-free conditions, are debeaked to prevent them from harming each other and cannibalism.

According to critics of the practice, this can cause hens severe pain to the point where some may refuse to eat and starve to death. Some hens may be force molted to increase egg quality and production level after the molting. Molting can be induced by extended feed withdrawal, water withdrawal or controlled lighting programs.

Laying hens are often slaughtered between 100 and 130 weeks of age, when their egg productivity starts to decline. Due to modern selective breeding, laying hen strains differ from meat production strains. As male birds of the laying strain do not lay eggs and are not suitable for meat production, they are generally killed soon after they hatch.

Free-range eggs are considered by some advocates to be an acceptable substitute to factory-farmed eggs. Free-range laying hens are given outdoor access instead of being contained in crowded cages.