A video surfaced on the web yesterday showing male baby chickens being throwing into a grinder while still alive. Other chicks were shown falling through the sorting machine and left to die on the factory floor among cracked eggs or after being scaled with washing water. Here is a link to video on YouTube so you can watch it happening for yourself. Even more horrifying is the egg industry’s stance that this is acceptable. Mitch Head, spokesman for the United Egg Producers, was quoted as saying “If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we’re happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need.” He also said that a grinder “is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks.”
THIS IS WRONG
When Raelene and I first started discussing about going vegan, she would ask bakeries and restaurants where they got their eggs. For smaller places the answer invariable was “CostCo”, which means chickens kept for life in cages too small for the animals to even turn around in, debeaking of the hens, and now we find out throwing the males into a grinder.How can this happen? There is far less regulation of the poultry industry than for mammals such as pigs and cows, so poultry factor farms can keep the animals in just about any condition they like and can do just about anything they want to them.
THIS IS WRONG
Before factor farming eggs were a clean source of food, now we have to worry about them carrying diseases such as salmonella.
Does this amount of suffering really justify cheap supermarket eggs? As a people, do we really think it is okay to grind babies alive? Why do we give children tours of idyllic farms where chickens run free and pigs wallow in the mud, and not the factory farms our food comes from? I urge you to, next time you are in the supermarket, think about what goes into the animal products you are buying. That pork roast means a pig that was boiled alive. That carton of milk means a calf in a veal crate. That carton of eggs means baby chickens ground up alive. Ask yourself, is it worth it?
For more information, visit the Mercy for Animals website.