Easter eggs are not all they're cracked up to be

 Egg factory farm photo by Compassion Over Killing.

Holiday traditions often celebrate the egg as a symbol life and renewal, and with Easter fast approaching, the egg industry is expecting to see a jump in sales. In fact, Easter week is typically considered the top egg selling week of the year.

When most people think about where eggs come from, they’re likely to conjure up idyllic images of Old MacDonald’s Farm with happy hens roaming freely around the barnyard. And why shouldn’t we? Such imagery is portrayed in children’s storybooks and commonly conveyed to us on egg cartons on store shelves.

No matter how you scramble them, boil them, or color them for Easter, however, the dismal reality is that behind nearly every “incredible, edible” egg sold in grocery stores today is a hen crammed inside a wire “battery cage” so restrictive, she can barely even move. Denied the opportunity to engage in many important natural behaviors, she can’t nest, forage for food, or even stretch her wings. Instead, she’s treated like a mere egg-producing machine. After her exhausted body becomes too battered and weak to continue laying a profitable number of eggs, she’ll finally be plucked from her cage; her first breath of fresh air will be on a truck bound for slaughter. That is, if she doesn’t die first or isn’t killed on the factory farm.

The Hard-Boiled Truth

Every year in the U.S., more than 250 million hens are forced to spend their lives intensively confined inside wire battery cages and are subjected to some of the worst abuses imaginable. These social and intelligent birds are arguably the most intensively confined animals on today’s massive and mechanized factory farms—on average, each hen is afforded a meager 67 square inches of living space. That’s less floor space than the size of a sheet of notebook paper. The daily miseries are inescapable: overcrowding, severe feather loss, untreated illness and injuries, birds immobilized in the wires of their cages, and dead birds left in cages with live hens.

The egg industry would prefer to keep such cruelties hidden from the public, but undercover investigations across the country, most recently in Maine, reveal the hard-boiled truth: cruelty to animals is standard business in the egg industry.

While cage-free hens lead better lives than their battery-caged brethren, cage-free eggs are still far from cruelty-free. Hens raised on cage-free farms still come from hatcheries where 50% of all chicks are killed the day they’re hatched (male chicks don’t lay eggs and are not the same breed as those raised for their meat). The tips of their beaks are still typically sliced off to help placate the effects of overcrowding, and they’re still killed after egg production wanes in about one to two years (the natural life span of a chicken is 8 to 10 years).

Cracking the Cruelty

As a growing number of people discover the painful reality of egg production, they’re increasingly removing their support from this cruel industry by choosing egg-free foods. Corporations are also taking notice—in the last two years, Morningstar Farms and Lightlife Foods both announced plans to significantly reduce their use of eggs and introduce new vegan products. And just last month, BOCA Foods agreed to stop using eggs altogether by the end of 2009.

This Easter, why not paint a picture of compassion by leaving eggs out of our shopping carts? It’s never been easier to celebrate life and renewal with egg-free recipes and treats that everyone—including the animals—can enjoy.