In Honor of World Egg Day

Or: Why eggs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be…

Credit: VeganStreet.com

Yesterday, an unsuspecting PR person sent me a cheery message, informing me that October 9 is World Egg Day, offering me recipes to share on my website. I think sometimes we are just put on a list of those who create food content and you would be shocked at the variety of animal torture people are trying to get this 25-year vegan to promote, something even just a quick glance at our URL should have prevented. In return, the PR person got a link to my story about the hidden cruelties of the egg industry and a couple of memes for good measure. Let’s hope for everyone’s sake I am no longer on her mailing list.

Credit: VeganStreet.com

Credit: VeganStreet.com

Credit: VeganStreet.com

Simply put, laying hens are some of the most brutalized and invisibilized animals on the planet, especially curious as there are more than 340 million birds in egg production at any moment in the United States alone, with an average hen laying nearly 295 eggs per year, their very reproductive systems exploited and weaponized in the most cruel way against them to add to the more than 99 billion eggs generated in the U.S. in just 2019 alone.

Credit: VeganStreet.com. A lot of vegetarians say that eating eggs is okay because it doesn’t kill the chickens. But they’re not thinking about the millions and millions of baby male chickens who are violently killed shortly after birth because they have no place in the industry. Yes, even the happy hens in their quaint little backyard coops lost their brothers this way.

Credit: VeganStreet.com. Click to learn more about the hidden truth of raising backyard chickens.

Credit: VeganStreet.com. The egg industry sure kills a lot of babies, as many as 360 million a year in the US alone according to the USDA. These, of course, are all the male chicks who can’t lay eggs and won’t grow up large enough to be sold for meat, so they are poured alive into industrial grinders or stuffed into tanks where they are gassed to death. There are many excellent vegan egg substitutes out there, so eating eggs is pretty much completely unnecessary. We link to our source and math here.

In stark contrast, the Red Jungle Fowl, which is thought to be the wild ancestor of the modern domesticated laying hen, will lay between 10–15 eggs a year in the wild. This increase of 20–30 times more eggs…