I actually used to believe this myth as well, so I get where you are coming from. Unfortunately, this sentiment is based in a series of lies and deceptions propagated by the egg industry. Consider the following facts:

*I’ve helped raise chickens for a number of years myself, so I know firsthand how intelligent and caring and sympathetic they are. Each one of them has a distinct personality, each one of them is definitely aware of its own existence, and each & every one of them definitely wants to continue living. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it — as science fully backs me up on these observations.

*Researchers have shown that mother hens display obvious signs of empathy for their baby chicks … Chickens are able to remember and recognize over 100 different individual chickens, and have also been shown to be able recognize and differentiate between individual humans as well … Like other birds and mammals, chickens experience REM sleep, which is associated with dreaming … Chickens have very sophisticated social behavior … Chickens perform complex communication where calls have specific meanings. They perform over 30 types of vocalization with meanings varying from calling youngsters, alarm calls, and alerting others, to the whereabouts of food … Chickens are able to comprehend that when an object is taken away and hidden from them (like an egg or a chick), it still exists. Young human children are unable to comprehend this … Hens are extremely affectionate and caring mothers. In ancient Christian writings, Jesus is said to have used the love of a hen for her brood to express God’s love for humans.

*For the vast majority of laying hens are constantly weary, emotionally abused, and physiologically exploited. They are enslaved in a cycle of forced reproduction whereby they are manipulated to produce up to TEN TIMES the eggs that they normally would if left alone to procreate naturally.  A hen normally goes through 3 reproductive cycles each year, each with between 10-12 eggs & then caring for her chicks thereafter.  On an egg farm, she will care for not a single chick and be forced to lay roughly 300 eggs in the same period of time.

*After 18 months to 2 years of hard labor (literally), the hen stops producing enough eggs to be profitable, and she is sent to slaughter — most often by stringing them up by their feet to have their throats slashed by an automated machine WHILE THEY ARE STILL CONSCIOUS. Often the machine misses, whereupon the unlucky hen is boiled alive in a scalding tank.

*For the vast majority of baby chicks that are born in the egg industry, the cruelty is even worse, with female chicks having the tips of their beaks burned off before being fattened up and sent to the egg-production cages as soon as possible — to live out their short lives in despicably squalid & impossibly cramped conditions. Male chicks, useless to the egg farmer, experience their own special nightmare — being either gassed, suffocated or ground up alive within hours after their birth.

*Even the most “humanely” treated “free range” hens are raised in disgusting, overcrowded hen houses (“free range” merely means the birds can’t be held in individual cages) and are cruelly slaughtered in “kill cones” — again, also WHILE STILL CONSCIOUS.

In conclusion, no matter what beliefs you hold about the relative intelligence level of chickens, there is no excuse for treating any sentient being this way … none whatsoever.

It is time to stop treating chickens cruelly, which means it is time for us to stop supporting the industry that still does so … Thank you.

“Our responsibility for the cruel manner in which we allow chickens to be treated in our culture is dismissed with blistering rhetoric designed to silence all reasonable objection: ‘How can you compare the feelings of a hen with those of a human being?” One answer is this: simply by looking at her. It doesn’t take special insight or credentials to see that a hen confined in a tiny cage or overcrowded coop is suffering, and it doesn’t take a large measure of intelligence to imagine what her feelings must be when her eggs are taken from her or when she is immobilized upside down before having her throat slit. As humans, we arrogantly believe that we are capable of knowing just about anything that we want to know—except, ironically, what it feels like to be one of our own victims. We are told we are being “over emotional” if we care about a chicken or grieve over a chicken’s plight. However, it is not our “emotion” that is under attack here, but rather the very qualities that make us human — namely, our ability to have sympathy, our ability to show compassion, and our ability to feel indignity on behalf of fellow sentient being who is in pain and calling for help.” ~ inspired by Karen Davis

P.S.  For those thinking that there are no alternatives to eggs when baking … think again:

Filed under: Sanctifying Sentience by Scaughdt