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A Mary T. Hoffman Commentary from All-Creatures.org

 

"Joyful Curmudgeon" An oxymoron?
No! I see all the beauty of God's creation and I'm joyful.  At the same time, I see all the suffering and corruption going on in the world, and feel called to help expose and end it so that we may have true peace and compassion.

 


Why We Don’t Eat Eggs – 23 January 2008
By Mary T. Hoffman

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

Go on to: Glorifying Cruelty – 24 January 2008
Return to: Coral Reefs – 22 January 2008
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