Bad Eggs

Imagine the world was ruled by chickens.
Imagine they took our women, placed them in little sheds that weren’t even big enough for them to scratch, they can’t wash, and are forced to have babies in these positions, with no privacy from all the other women stacked next to them. I myself, squished in there with my nose touching my shoulder and my leg bent backwards, would be pretty depressed, to understate, not forgetting the disgusting cramp I’d get probably after an hour, let a lone a whole year. But hey, the chickens don’t mind. They’re saving money after all.
The other week, I was in the big Sainsbury’s and in the confusion of misplaced labels, low prices and things put on the wrong shelves, I bought a box of battery farmed eggs. I didn’t realise until I got home, and I was dismayed, appalled, and to be honest I’m annoyed with myself for not taking the bloody things back (don’t know what Sainsbury’s refund policy is on eggs). One thing for certain was that I didn’t use them.
This got me thinking as to why I’m so opposed to them - I’ve always known battery farmed eggs were bad, and hated them, but I couldn’t say completely why that was - so I did the obvious thing and googled it. 70% of the UK’s eggs are battery farmed. This means: the hens have the room of an A4 piece of paper to move, they never see what they produce, they can’t flap or scratch or dust-bathe, and after the average of a year, they’re finally taken out and slaughtered. They never come into contact with a rooster; all their eggs are artificially produced and most male chicks are killed because they have no use as a living thing. Unsurprisingly, these conditions can turn the hens a bit mental (as I’m sure we all would stuck in some windowless box with our hands behind our backs); with the discomfort of having to lay in utter public (even hens need their privacy guys!) and nothing to see but their hutchmates’ bodies, the chickens can turn violent and sometimes end up pecking each other to death. Thankfully, some farmers can deal with this by ‘beaktrimming’ - using a red hot blade to take off part of the hen’s beak, which sometimes causes them to die from either bleeding or shock.
One of the most painful things about this - not counting the actual horrific elements of it - is that, according to surveys, a free range hen will on average only produce 15 eggs less than a battery hen in a year. Ask yourself - would there really be such an egg shortage if all our eggs were free range, or at least barn (when hens are all kept together in a big barn, not nearly as good as free range, but have room to walk about and peck the ground - all a chicken really asks for in life)? Of course, one argument might be that most chickens are only reproduced to serve the purpose of being a battery hen, and wouldn’t be alive were it not for that. Nothing asks to be born! I’m sure the hen’s not sitting there with a big unitchable itch in its back thinking, ‘well, my life’s crap, but I’m thankful I got a chance to live’.
Not wanting to sound like an animal-loving lunatic, but all living things have the basic emotions: fear, contentment and pain. And why should we enforce anything negative on a creature that doesn’t have a choice? Sounds a bit like sadism, when you put it like that…
But the solution to this frankly revolting problem is amazingly simple: stop buying battery farmed eggs. M&S have finished with them, and now only use free range eggs in all their products. Unfortunately, good old Marks and Sparks can be a bit pricey for us students, but so long as we continue to support the other supermarkets that are planning to abolish the evil eggs, which are Waitrose (all own brand stuff uses free-range), Sainsbury’s (Taste the Difference range are completely free-range), Co-op and Budgens (working towards being battery farmed free), and even Asda which has a small, special range dedicated to using free-range only, and society will start to get the message. If McDonalds, one of the biggest corporations in the world, can switch to using free-range only, which it did in 2003, isn’t that’s incentive for any individual or business? It’s pretty easy when you think about it - if Cadbury’s Wispa bars were taken off the market due to poor sales, surely the same would follow with battery farm eggs…
Next time you’re having a cooked breakfast, making an omelette or baking a cake, please just think about where your ingredients came from. I don’t know about you, but I’d be happier splashing out on that 50p more - things can taste a lot nastier if you know they were gotten out of a miserable life.