Today is about challenging appearances and assumptions of extremism and normality.
Today is a lesson in unlearning.
Anytime we make a living being into a machine, a supplier of inventory, the bottom line will
always be profit. And increasing profit means increasing output and increasing efficiency.
The bodies of layer hens give out prematurely from the extreme demands of production.
Every aspect of their lives is regulated to ensure maximum output. From controlling their laying
cycles with days and days of persistent light followed by long periods of complete darkness,
to starving them for weeks at a time to force yet another egg cycle from their worn out
bodies, to the outright manipulation of their very genetic makeup.
We’ve optimized our machines, you see, and we've bred one kind of chicken for meat and another
kind for eggs. Because of this, the egg industry produces millions if not a billion unwanted
male baby chicks every year. Male layer chicks can’t lay eggs. So they are of no use.
To “dispose of”—as they say—these baby chicks, they are either painfully gassed,
slowly suffocated in plastic bags, or they are ground up alive. We’re talking about
the cute fluffy yellow baby chicks we adore come Easter time.
They are not even granted three days of life.
This is standard practice all over the world. This is standard practice all over the world.
The sisters of the egg industry’s discarded sons get to live out their short lives in
cramped battery cages, unable to even extend their wings. Of course nowadays we hear about
the rise of free-range and cage-free facilities. But in truth, the only comfort these labels
bring is to our own conscience. Cage-free birds are crammed into tiny sheds and have
twice the mortality rates of battery raised hens.
I hope you are starting to see the power of this lie. Of presenting cruel confinement,
starvation, abuse, the barbaric murder of day-old babies and the slaughter of one-year-olds—themselves
still children— as something completely normal and kind—packaged in perfect little orbs.
And we have the audacity to decorate them in celebration of new life. To fawn over the
very chicks who were ground up alive for their production. To mix them into treats for our
children and loved ones. To start our day with the products of abject misery and call
it “sunny side up.” We might as well start our day by throwing chicks in a blender.
And people say veganism is extreme.
The animal products we perceive as mundane, when reverse engineered, reveal a perversely
complex and, to put it lightly, ethically challenging, journey from genesis through
processing and production to the end product. That is to say, from the animals’ birth,
through confinement, abuse, slaughter and denigration of corpses to the shiny, happy,
store-ready products we literally eat up without even a single thought
as to what the animals went through.