🥚🐔 Cracked Lives: The Pain of Chicks and Hens in the Egg Industry

When we crack an egg into a pan, we rarely think about the hen who laid it. But the egg industry is one of the cruelest forms of animal exploitation, robbing hens of their freedom, their health, and even their right to be mothers. Peta India’s investigation reveals: What’s Wrong With Eating Eggs? and here’s another Animal Equality investigation: Leah’s Story.

💔 Life of a Hen in the Egg Industry:

• Hatcheries use incubators to artificially hatch chicks, separating mothers from babies forever.
• Half the chicks born are male, useless to the egg industry. The egg industry “discards” these male babies by suffocating them in plastic bags, drowning them in barrels of water, burning them alive, crushing them in huge machines, or throwing them to fishes in ponds to eat them dead or alive. Another recent Peta India investigation reveals the Gruesome Methods for Killing Chicks
• Workers cut off the tips of the beaks of little one-day-old chicks with hot blades causing severe pain. Why? So they will not injure other hens when they attack each other out of frustration in their cramped cages.
• The egg industry packs hens into cages with less than 1 square foot of space each, making them unable to stretch their wings or walk freely.
• Workers take their eggs away daily, denying them their natural instinct to sit on and protect their eggs.

A hen naturally clucks to her chicks even before they hatch, teaching them her calls. She carefully regulates temperature and humidity for her eggs, splashing water to keep them safe. But the egg industry destroys motherhood by denying all these to her. She never sees her babies and her babies never see her. When her body is exhausted after about 68 weeks of laying eggs, she is no longer profitable and the egg farmer sells her for slaughter for her wasted flesh.

But these hens are forced to live in cramped cages their entire short lives.

👉 The egg industry is not just about “food.” It is about denying sentient beings their basic rights: the right to freedom, motherhood, and life itself.

🌱 We Can Choose Compassion
We do not need eggs for health. Our traditional Indian dishes like poha, upma, idli, dosa, sabudana vada, etc are delicious breakfast dishes. And an even better way to start the day energetically is by eating fruit. Plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables, grains and millets, pulses and legumes, nuts, and seeds provide all the nutrition we need… without so much intentional cruelty. There are also delicious egg-free alternatives for baking, cooking, and everyday meals.

✨ By choosing not to consume eggs, we stop looking at hens as egg-laying machines and instead honor them as the beautiful, intelligent, social beings they truly are. They deserve a life where they can express their natural behaviours and live with other beings of their own species in peace.