A Rare Glimpse Inside a “Free-Range” Egg Facility
I don’t eat eggs because I don’t eat animals, no matter how they’re treated. But for those of you who still eat eggs and do so only if they are say "free-range" and/or "cage-free," you should read Jewel Johnson’s "A Rare Glimpse Inside a ‘Free-Range’ Egg Facility." Johnson visited two facilities, including "a well known Free-Range Organic Egg farm." and they were nothing like Old McDonald’s farm, the image I conjure when I think about free range and organic. The reality is that free-range facilities can be just as cruel, intensive and filthy as the factory farm of your worst nightmares.
From debeaking to the early slaughter of male chicks to standing on grates with nothing to build a nest with, surrounded by metal and cement and never seeing the light of day, the environment the hens live in is as bleak as it gets. It may be "organic," because the feed is organic, and it may be "cage-free" because there are no individual cages (just one big one: a shed), but does the description match what you think you’re getting when you buy eggs? The organic farmer, as Johnson attests, is probably "doing the best job that could possibly be done to raise egg laying hens for profit," and he has gassed about 80,000 hens (no company will take them for slaughter for dog food or soup).
The point isn’t to hate the farm owner or the workers. The point is that if you’re going to be competitive in the marketplace, and run your business like a business, it must be efficient. If you think about every aspect of the farms Johnson visited, as well as other "factory farms," efficiency is key. There is no room for compassion, and there is no room to consider the animals as individuals who might have an interest in not being tortured.
There have been farmers and ranchers of all kinds over the years who have ceased their operations due to some sort of epiphany about the suffering they’ve caused. You hear about those people (like the Howard Lyman: Mad Cowboy, who’s against factory farming, and not really due to the suffering but for health reasons) because they aren’t the norm. But most farmers and ranchers aren’t going to sprout a conscience anytime soon. They cannot be counted on to do the right thing so we must do it for them. We must boycott all animal products and send the message that our primary desire isn’t for comfort for the animals. Our desire is for their freedom, and there’s only one way that’s going to happen, and the comfort issue is taken care of simultaneously.
There are some genuine 'free range' farms around, and farmers who care about the animals on their farms.
Have a look at our website wwww.freeranger.com.au
We have visits from environmental groups, students, farmer organisations and many others to see the way we run our property.
No matter where the egg production facility is, or what the 'visible to the public 'conditions are, the egg-laying hens are obtained from the same hatcheries that kill the baby rooster chicks at only one day old. If this "free-range" farm hatches its own chicks, two important questions still remain.
1. What happens to ALL of the male chicks – not just few token roosters – ALL of them?
2. What happens to the hens when they are no longer laying enough eggs for this facility to be profitable?
If the spent hens and ALL roosters were allowed to live out their lives until they died a natural death – chickens can live well over a decade – then that farm would soon have thousands of "spent" hens and roosters to care for. Obviously, the lifelong care of all of those birds, at all stages of a natural life span, would cut severely into any profits made by selling the eggs of younger hens.
So what happens to all of the boys? And what happens to all of the spent hens? Hens are generally considered spent by egg-laying facilities at one to two years – meaning, the farm then has to provide predator-proof shelter, food, veterinary care, etc. for that same hen, for another decade. The roosters will require dozens of separate yards, predator-proof shelters, food, vet care, etc. for their entire lives. In order to make a profit, the numbers simply don't add up unless the inevitable killing of roosters and spent hens is occurring.