Egg Industry Is A Foul Business
This Valentine’s Day, do something good for your heart: Say goodbye to eggs in your diet.
Egg yolks contain a whopping 213 mg of cholesterol each. Serving up just one egg for breakfast each morning can raise your cholesterol level by as much as 10 points! Women who eat eggs daily triple their risk of breast cancer.
Dumping eggs from your diet helps your heart in another way, too - one your doctor might not notice, but you sure will. Although you might think eggs are still produced on an Old MacDonald’s-type farm, with chickens living together in small flocks, sunning, scratching in the soil and sheltering tiny chicks beneath their wings, the sad truth is, Old MacDonald is now running a factory.
Squeezed inside tiny, crowded, indoor wire cages, today’s hens bred for their eggs live with up to five others on floor space the size of a record album cover. Crammed against each other and the wire bars, the chickens lose feathers and their skin becomes raw and bloody. Hundreds of cages, stacked atop each other, fill the laying sheds and excrement from one falls through the mesh onto the birds below. Some of the hens get their feet stuck in the wire floors, making it impossible for them to move. They die inches from food and water.
Born to flap their wings, strut and roost, these chickens are barely able to move. Bewildered hens strike out in frustration, pecking at the only target available - each other. Cannibalized chickens mean lower profits, so factory workers “solve” the problem by slicing off chicks’ beaks with a hot blade, sometimes taking part of their tongues or faces. The procedure, which requires cutting through tender tissue similar to the flesh under human fingernails, is so painful some chicks die of shock.
Because the filthy conditions in these battery houses can lead to widespread disease, hens are pumped full of antibiotics. There is no veterinary care for ill birds; they are simply thrown onto “dead piles.” Since the birds are genetically and environmentally manipulated to produce huge numbers of eggs, they “burn out” after about 18 months and are slaughtered for soups and dog food.
The egg industry deems male chicks a wasteful by-product since they can’t lay eggs and are considered too small to be raised for meat. Newly hatched males are thrown into garbage bags, like so much trash, to suffocate or be crushed to death.
What about “free-range” eggs? Sadly, most chickens who produce them are anything but free. Eggs may be legally sold as “free-range” if hens have access to the outdoors - period. Regulations specify nothing more. “Free-range” hens usually don’t have ample space, exercise, social lives and access to vegetation as the name implies, but often live in exactly the same conditions as battery hens. The only difference? The cages are outdoors.
It’s easy, healthy and compassionate to cut out eggs. Simple, delicious egg replacers, now commonplace, make it easier than ever. So go egg-free for Valentine’s Day - your heart will thank you.
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