+Chicken Little: "Except the bird doesn't suffer from laying eggs. You wanna talk about cage-free, I'll agree with you, but honestly... no. They'll lay eggs whether humans are involved or not. Not suffering, at all."

I'm sad to say, +Chicken Little, that eggs are much more suffering laden than you realize. The horrors start at hatching, with all the males being disposed of, and usually in torturous ways (e.g. being ground alive for use in chicken nuggets, or being electrocuted, or even thrown in the garbage with the bag tied shut to slowly suffocate to death under the weight of his siblings).

I know that the "cage free" label sounds appealing, but it sadly has little meaning, serving only as a marketing ploy. It doesn't mean the animals live outside or that they eat a diet free of arsenic and antibiotics, and it doesn't mean that they don't have their (very sensitive) beaks removed (without painkillers). For laying hens, this usually means she is in a stack several birds high and in a crowded cage just like the non-cage-free birds, but instead of pressing against the sides of that cage, she has a couple of inches clearance on either side of her body.

The hens that lay eggs go through "forced molting", which translates as giving her no feed for seven to fourteen days at a stretch, causing her reproductive cycle to reset. They are forced to undergo this process several times during their life, which is cut dreadfully short; she will live two years or less, until her body is exhausted from the stresses of constant laying and her egg production decreases. When you consider that she would live to be eight to ten years if left to her own devices, she is essentially killed as teenager.

Then there's the horrifying conditions faced at the slaughter house, which include watching her brethren be killed before her, being scalded alive, and being hung upside down on a conveyor to have her throats cut.

Withal, +Chicken Little, it's hard for me to see how eggs can be thought of as anything but cruel, you know?

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This post is one in a series in which excerpts of discussions on veganism from other threads are reposted (or paraphrased) for the sake of expanding the conversation. As always, your thoughts and questions are welcome. See the full collection via the #spommveganchats hash (or perhaps with a more robust search, such as goo.gl/JoxZC).

(for anyone requiring/desiring more context, the original conversation can be found at goo.gl/Iaiib)

In the egg industry, only females are required because males don't lay eggs. As such, in the breeding process, the males and females are divided when they hatch, and the males are killed immediately as they serve no purpose. Subsequently, their sisters go on to be kept in captivity until their egg production is no longer profitable to the farmer, at which point they have their throats slit. This is generally at around one or two years old. The average lifespan of a chicken is eight years.