The Egg Industry
Life for egg-laying hens begins at a hatchery. Eggs are collected from parent birds and are stored, incubated, and hatched over a 31 day period. The male and female chicks are sorted onto separate conveyor belts. As the male chicks are unable to produce eggs themselves and are a completely different breed to the chickens used for meat, they are considered waste products along with any female chicks who are perceived to be deformed or weak. These male and weak chicks are sorted onto a conveyor belt, separated from the healthy females on their first day of life, and sent into an industrial blender called a macerator. Maceritng chicks is legal and referred to as humane by the RSPCA. However, smaller hatchers may use carbon dioxide or simply suffocate the chicks in plastic bags as a cheap form of disposal. All commercial egg farms - caged, barn laid, free-range, organic, RSPCA-approved - involve the killing of male chicks.
Meanwhile, the healthy females continue on to painful debeaking machines. Hens are debeaked to minimize the harm they can do to each other in the confinement of egg farms.
The chicks are then stacked in trays and trucked to pullet rearing farms all across the country where they will remain for four months until they begin laying eggs. A small number of males will be spared the macerator in order to serve with a selection of hens as parents birds laying and fertilizing eggs for the hatchery.
There are two typical methods of storing egg-laying chickens: in battery cages or “free-range”.
Each shed can contain up to 100,000 hens with between 4 and 20 per cage and each hen is afforded a space smaller than an A4 piece of paper. As these spaces are so confined, they are unable to stretch their wings or express any natural behaviors such as dust bathing, perching, or foraging.
Due to decades of genetic manipulation and selective breeding, factory-farmed hens lay an egg almost every day for a total of up to 300 per year compared to that of 10-15 a wild hen would lay. As they age, the poor environment and physical stress of frequent egg-laying takes a toll on their health, indicated by the gradual loss of all their feathers and an increasingly pale comb, suggesting anemia. Deaths in the cages are common and due to the size of the facilities, the carcasses can be easily missed for long periods of time forcing the surviving hens to live on top of the rotting bodies. Newer cage systems collect the feces onto conveyor belts beneath the cages, while older systems allow it to pile up underneath. Birds who manage to escape the cages are left to die in these manure pits.
At eighteen months of age, after living in a cage for over a year, their egg production will have slowed significantly enough to be considered “spent.” They are “depopulated” - pulled from the cages- and stuffed into crates which often results in bone fractures due to the rough handling. They are either gassed to death and then buried or sent to the slaughterhouse. They are then replaced by new 4-mont old hens.
Contrary to what free-range might mean, up until 2016, there were no national standards on what could be claimed as free-range eggs. Now, free-range farms are capped at a maximum outdoor density of 10,000 hens per about 2.5 acres or one chicken per square meter. This is misleading as they still spend most of their lives indoors. There is, however, still no regulation on how much space or outdoor time egg-laying hens are allowed to have. Additionally, there is no regulation for how large the door was to the outside, which would prevent them from actually accessing fresh air. The term free-range is often paired with the term “cage-free” as they aren’t stored in cages but are still living in sheds with similar extreme, close quarters.
Chickens naturally form and live within a social hierarchy called a pecking order, but are only able to recognize around 100 other chickens. In sheds or paddocks, with thousands of other birds, their inability to maintain the pecking order results in chaos. The weak birds are picked on with no way to escape. And due to close proximities, disease spreads rapidly.
Many of the larger free-range farms also have cage farms on the same property with the eggs from both ending up in the same packaging. A 2009 analysis of Egg Corporation data indicated that as many as one in six eggs sold as “free-range” were laid by caged or barn hens.
As with caged farms, free-range hens are sent to slaughter from just 18 months of age, whereas the normal and natural lifespan of a chicken is 10 years. At the slaughterhouse, the hens are shackled upside-down on a moving line. They are lowered into a bath of electrified water to stun them prior to their throats being cut by an automatic blade. However, if they lift their heads, they can miss the stun bath and face the automated blade fully conscious and ultimately drowning in scalding water further down the process.
The slaughtered hens largely end up in lower-grade chicken meat products such as mince or rendered into poultry meal for use in pet food or to be fed back to farmed animals.
Unlike meat chickens, egg-laying hens’ final purpose isn’t their death, but it is an extreme side effect. Poor and inhumane living conditions contribute to the idea that egg-laying hens are not dissimilar to meat chickens - though their purpose is different - their lives parallel.
AustralianPigFarming, director. Dominion (2018) - Full Documentary [Official]. YouTube, YouTube, 9 Oct. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko&t=1403s.
images credited to @livekindlyco @dominionmovenemt and @weanimals
