I never really thought about how animals were raised and what that might mean to me ethically and also for my health until recently.
I have now made a vow that whenever I had the choice I would buy eggs and meat only from people that allow the animal a real life. The challenge is that when you go to the store - you seldom have that choice. Organic as a label does not mean that an animal has been kept as an animal should. As Organic has spread - factory organic is a new reality.
So here is my choice for eggs - I buy them from friends. This is what the choice means
This is how many egg layers live now
(Photo and text credit - Farm Santuary)
There are approximately 300 million egg laying hens in the U.S. confined in battery cages — small wire cages stacked in tiers and lined up in rows inside huge warehouses. In accordance with the U( SDA's recommendation to give each hen four inches of 'feeder space,' hens are commonly packed four to a cage measuring just 16 inches wide. In this tiny space, the birds cannot stretch their wings or legs, and they cannot fulfill normal behavioral patterns or social needs. Constantly rubbing against the wire cages, they suffer from severe feather loss, and their bodies are covered with bruises and abrasions.
In order to reduce injuries resulting from excessive pecking — an aberrant behavior that occurs when the confined hens are bored and frustrated — practically all laying hens have part of their beaks cut off. Debeaking is a painful procedure that involves cutting through bone, cartilage, and soft tissue.
Laying more than 250 eggs per year each, laying hens' bodies are severely taxed. They suffer from "fatty liver syndrome" when their liver cells, which work overtime to produce the fat and protein for egg yolks, accumulate extra fat. They also suffer from what the industry calls 'cage layer fatigue,' and many become 'egg bound' and die when their bodies are too weak to pass another egg.
I can't read this and buy another regg that comes from a system like this - no matter that the poor hens are filled with antibiotics etc and that hens kept like this may the real breeding ground for bird flue. It is not just my safety - it is how can I support this?
Is there another way?
What if there were many people like my friends who refined a way to have 200 hens living a real chicken life? What if there were hundreds of such operations? What if there was a kind of network eBay that linked them to buyers? What if this spread idea from eggs to poultry? What if we then added real pigs? What about small milk production? What about cheese?
What if scale was not a factory but a network of thousands of small mixed operations? Hey what if this could bring back the real family farm as a viable way of life?
What would this do for our health? What would this do for our souls? What would this do to our landscape and our ecology?
I am going to explore this in the next few months. What if I started on PEI with a poll to find out who would like to buy real eggs from real chickens? After all it was the egg and the cheese coops here on PEI that 100 years ago brought cash into the family farm for the first time.
