Yesterday, I posted an article that appeared in the New York Times. It was about the terrible conditions of many commercial chicken factories.

Both Robin and Kari commented on the article and I want to include their comments here. I also want to post a few pictures I took when we were driving home from Southern California.

We were stopped at one of the rest stops along the I5 highway and the driver of this truck stopped as well. Check out his load.

Click on the picture to enlarge it and you can see these meat birds don’t look healthy. Think of the stress for the birds when they are taken off to slaughter.

Some of them have mangled legs. Compare this picture with the next one.

When we raise meat birds here in the Valley, they have access to a fenced in yard so they can get outside in the sunshine and fresh air.

When we slaughter a chicken, it is gently picked up and carried to the chopping block. There’s usually some petting going on as we’re holding them. When they die, they have had no pressure or stress beforehand. Think about how much better our chickens must taste, compared to the ones jammed in crates, exposed to the weather for hours and then getting whacked.

It seems cruel to me to transport crates of tightly packed birds off to slaughter. I think chickens deserve more respect than that. Don’t you?

I mentioned that there were a couple really good comments about yesterday’s post. Here they are.

Robin comments:

We’ve kept laying hens since 1997 and I’ve purchased eggs once since then. I cracked one egg, a gross mess of pale yolk and runny white. I had forgotten how disgusting they are after nearly a decade of not seeing them. I threw the eggs in the trash and didn’t bake cookies that day.

The humane vs animal cruelty issue is the other reason we don’t buy or eat factory eggs. We don’t have them here, not in restaurants, not in store-bought baking. I never want to look at pictures or videos of tortured birds and know that it’s my fault.

Keeping hens is simple and doesn’t require a lot of room. My four silkie hens produce enough eggs for two people and treats for the dogs. The seven full-sized birds provide eggs for extra things like potato and egg salad, boiled eggs in summer salad, baking and friends.

Egg factories should be closed. There’s no excuse for such monstrosities. I do understand the ramifications of not having factory eggs for restaurants, industrial baking, etc. Our diets would improve greatly. Nobody dies because they can’t eat an egg from a tortured bird.

And then Kari commented:

I can’t even imagine how many barns or how much land is used to house 4.5 million chickens.
Joel Salatin says, get a hen or two, and keep her in the house.  It is no different than keeping a parakeet and you get to collect the eggs!
I watched a video the other day about commercial egg processing and it showed how they are cleaned and scrubbed with “a mild detergent”, then they are “disinfected with chlorine or ammonia” and finally they are polished with mineral oil to reseal the pores of the egg.
It is frightening to think how much chlorine or ammonia sneaks into the eggs. Not to mention the deplorable conditions that the hens are kept in for their short miserable lives.
Thanks for sharing the information. The more you know, the closer to home you want to get your food.
People could shut down the factories in a very short period of time by refusing to buy the good.

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Thanks for your comments – the more we get the information out to people the better.

Here’s a good article about how commercial factories raise chickens in order to sell their eggs. I’ve included the link to the New York Times so please head over there to read the entire article.

Supermarket eggs gleam with apparent cleanliness, and nothing might seem more wholesome than breaking one of them into a frying pan.

Think again. The Humane Society of the United States plans to release on Thursday the results of an undercover investigation into Kreider Farms, a major factory farm that produces 4.5 million eggs each day for supermarkets like ShopRite.

I’ve reviewed footage and photos taken by the investigator, who says he worked for Kreider between January and March of this year. In an interview, he portrayed an operation that has little concern for cleanliness or the welfare of hens.

“It’s physically hard to breathe because of the ammonia” rising from manure pits below older barns, said the investigator, who would not allow his name to be used because that would prevent him from taking another undercover job in agriculture. He said that when workers needed to enter an older barn, they would first open doors and rev up exhaust fans, and then rush in to do their chores before the fumes became overwhelming.

Mice sometimes ran down egg conveyer belts, barns were thick with flies and manure in three barns tested positive for salmonella, he said. (Actually, salmonella isn’t as rare as you might think, turning up in 3 percent of egg factory farms tested by the Food and Drug Administration last year.)

In some cases, 11 hens were jammed into a cage about 2 feet by 2 feet. The Humane Society says that that is even more cramped than the egg industry’s own voluntary standards — which have been widely criticized as inadequate.

An automatic feeding cart that runs between the cages sometimes decapitates hens as they’re eating, the investigator said. Corpses are pulled out if they’re easy to see, but sometimes remain for weeks in the cages, piling up until they have rotted into the wiring, he added.

Other hens have their heads stuck in the wire and are usually left to die, the investigator said.

Read the rest of this article here. Please leave a comment here on our site and let us know your thoughts about buying eggs from the big commercial factories.