It’s bad enough when people who don’t know any better eat eggs, but
when someone who claims to be vegetarian continues to do so, there is
no excuse. At a vegetarian gathering last year I heard a man, who was
sitting nearby, aggressively proclaiming that he ate eggs. I figured
that his “in your face” attitude probably came from a guilty
conscience.
I can try to excuse away his egg-eating by imagining that perhaps he
eats eggs from his own or a friend’s chickens; but anyone else hearing
him would feel justified in eating the eggs commonly sold in stores.
Since this was not someone new to vegetarianism, my opinion of him and
his wife who is well-known, plummeted and I tried to avoid them. Am I
being self-righteous? No; just hurt. Read on and you will begin to
understand why:
To begin with, in the egg industry, baby female chickens have the
ends of their beaks cut off with the hot knife of the debeaking machine.
No anesthesia is used and this is extremely painful! As one would
expect, some chickens have too much of their beak cut off, and sometimes
the end of the chicken’s tongue is also cut off. Every human who eats an
egg is helping to torture and mutilate another baby chicken.
Why are battery hens debeaked? When chickens are so crowded together,
they irritate one another, just as we would under similar living
conditions. Chickens respond to such irritation by pecking the other
bird. In natural living conditions, the offending bird would just move
away; but in cages, they can't, so these "farmers" cut off the end of
their beaks to minimize the injuries. People create one evil and then
create another evil to try to correct the first evil. How depraved!
Typically, six egg laying hens are packed into a wire battery cage
which has a floor the size of a folded newspaper. They cannot even
stretch their wings. By constantly rubbing against their wire cages, egg
laying hens suffer from severe feather loss. This is a human-caused
condition! Then there are the eye problems, the infections, the tumors,
et cetera, suffered by the hens in these torture chambers.
Some hens manage to escape from their cages, only to fall into the
manure pits below, where they meet a slow death without food or water.
In the manure pits, COK investigators found mass graves of dead hens,
presumably discarded there by workers. The chickens that are alive have
to live in the stench and fumes of the rotting remains of their
companions and their own feces.
How far humans have fallen and continue to fall since Jesus uttered
this analogy about gathering “your children together, just as a hen
gathers her brood under her wings” as quoted in Luke 13:34 –
34 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and
stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children
together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would
not have it!
~ New American Standard Bible
Hard-of-heart people who are motivated by greed continue to exploit
animals in the most perverse imaginable ways.
The egg industry is cruel. Be compassionate! Don't support them with
your money. Don't eat eggs!
Please visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/chicken.html
To learn how egg-eating impacts health, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/health/sub-eggs.html
For great-tasting recipes, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/recipes.html
