As horrific as the news was earlier this week, regarding the mistreatment of chickens in Chilliwack by chicken catchers, it was only one step further than the torture endured by the thousands of battery cage chickens who produce eggs for sale in your favourite grocery store.
Most eggs come from chickens hatched from mass-produced, inseminated eggs — chicks who never had a mother to teach them Chickenese.
Most of the mis-named farm fresh eggs are laid by chickens who never see the light of day and never peck at a bug or feel the sun or wind in their feathers. Quite often their beaks are painfully cut so they won’t attack and injure their cell mates out of sheer frustration.
All the 18-month-lives of egg-producing battery chickens are spent cooped up together in stacked rows of small wire cages, with three or four to a cage big enough for one bird. They can never spread their wings.
To balance they must curl their toes around wire which is slightly slanted so their eggs roll down for easy gathering, and open so their excrement falls through and can be collected for fertilizer.
People who have bought battery hens when their laying life is over have said their feet can’t straighten out, they are permanently curled.
Humans who raise and profit from these maltreated forms of God-given life call themselves farmers, so when farm-fresh eggs are advertised it is usually promoting the product of a year and a half of chicken hell.
It is possible to verify this description of egg-laying life, by searching Google for the definition of “Battery Chickens,” but I have personally witnessed the horror.
During sexing of the newborns, the tiny, defenceless male chicks are tossed aside in a pile to suffocate and die. No eggs? No profit.
Why is this practice allowed to continue? Because we, the shopping public, don’t want to pay a dollar or two more for free range or free run eggs, both of which are becoming more accurately described, and available in grocery stores.
Free run eggs are laid by chickens allowed to run free inside a barn-like structure. They are crowded, but can at least walk around to partially to do their chicken things. Free range hens are provided with coops for the night, but are happily free to roam outside.
Of course it’s more expensive for farmers to allow their flocks a more or less normal life. But the eggs from free run or free range birds have yellower yolks and taste like eggs. They may cost more in money but not in conscience.
A recent survey discovered that British Columbians are more concerned with the maltreatment of the animals and birds we eat than residents of other provinces.
Change for the better has been promised, but until that change, thousands upon thousands of innocent creatures will continue to suffer.
Nadine Jones is a Richmond resident and former journalist for the Vancouver Sun
