In his 2014 book, Changing the Game: Animal Liberation in the Twenty-First Century, Norm Phelps wrote:
“You can’t walk a mile in the shoes of a battery chicken, because battery chickens can’t walk a foot, much less a mile. But stand for an hour in the cage of a battery hen. Stand jammed so tightly in a cage with other birds that you cannot turn around or stretch your wings. Feel the wire of the mesh floor cut into your feet and have the feces of your cellmates caked on your feathers with no way to wash it off. Breathe air so poisonous with ammonia from the urine of tens of thousands of your cellmates that your jailers and torturers have to wear gas masks when they enter the building. Never see sunshine. Never feel a cool breeze. Never breathe fresh air. If you are injured or fall ill, you just suffer.
“Nobody cares, nobody is going to send for a doctor. If you die, so what? It’s cheaper than giving you medical care.
“This is the existence of a battery hen from shortly after she is born until the moment she is slaughtered. She never sees the outdoors, never walks on grass, never takes dust baths or pecks in the dirt, and never sleeps on a perch or sits on a nest. Her life is joyless, hopeless, saturated with suffering twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the two years that she is allowed to live — a bleak, abysmal, agonizing existence without friendship, comfort, or consolation.”
Laying hens essentially live as prisoners and slaves in concentration camps. Dr. Alex Hershaft, Holocaust survivor and Co-founder of Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), notes similarities between “the oppression he had witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust and the oppression of animals.”
Fortunately there is a tiny bit of progress happening in the U.S. animal welfare movement. According to Wikipedia, as of March 2020, California, Massachusetts, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island had passed laws banning the use of battery cages, and the former three additionally banned the sale of eggs produced in battery cages.
But, even if a few hens are “cage-free,” they are still prisoners, and as slaves they must lay many more eggs than they would lay naturally. Consider these facts in an article (“Eggs: What Are You Really Eating?”) by Free From Harm:
“In fact, the process of making and passing an egg requires so much energy and labor that in nature, wild hens lay only 10 to 15 eggs per year. (1, 2) The Red Jungle Fowl — the wild relatives from whom domestic layer hens are descended — lay one to two clutches of eggs annually, with 4 to 6 eggs per clutch on average. (3) Their bodies could never sustain the physical depletion of laying the hundreds of eggs that domestic chickens have been forced to produce through genetic manipulation. It is a common misconception that chickens are always just naturally “giving” eggs, because modern egg hens have been intensively bred to lay between 250 to 300 eggs a year. But in the wild, chickens, like all birds, lay only during breeding season — primarily in the spring — and only enough eggs to assure the survival of their genes.”
It is time for a vegan world — a world of kindness and mercy to the chickens, and to all the non-human animals. All of those beautiful, sensitive beings are here with us, not for us. It is time for humankind to free the non-human animals from their enslavement, slaughter, and suffering.
If you are not yet vegan, please check out Farm Sanctuary’s great information for going vegan: Handy Guide!
Hens: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay.
