Eggs and cholesterol

I was confronted with wall-to-wall ads for "World egg day" when I visited Yahoo today. The video above covers some of the reasons why you might want to make it "World egg-less day."

Yet, vegans and other ethical eaters would not eat eggs even if they were the extremely healthy. Why so? Don't the hens just give up the eggs for us to eat? What's the harm? "Battery hens" or "cage eggs" are the common responses - hens being forced into incredibly tight wire cages in lightless barns, unable to move or see daylight. Yet, vegans and many other ethical eaters don't eat "free range" eggs either. What's with that?! Well, there are two ways of looking at it. The vegan ideal is to avoid contributing to animal exploitation, so it wouldn't matter how well the hens are treated - they could be in your backyard - they are still being exploited. What about people who abstain for less idealistic reasons? Two main things:

• all laying hens (including free-range) are slaughtered at about 18 months when their egg production wanes, whereas a natural lifespan can be 12 years
• what happens to all to all the male chicks?..

I must admit I had never thought about the latter until this year. To provide all the laying hens, a certain (large) number of chicken eggs need to be fertilised and hatched each year. However, about half of the chicks are male. These are commercially "worthless" - it is not viable to grow them to become meat ("broiler") chickens, and they won't lay eggs. So, what is their fate? They are either gassed to death or ground up alive. How many? About 12 million per year in Australia alone.

You don't need to subscribe to the vegan ideal to be uncomfortable with this, in which case the answer is simple - don't eat eggs. You'll get some great health benefits as a free bonus.

Here is an Animals Unleashed video on the day old male chicks (rated PG):


Here are a couple more graphic videos: