Image: Sarah-Claude Lévesque St-Louis, pexels.com
Recent egg shortages caused by the current avian flu outbreak have led many people to consider keeping backyard chickens as a source of fresh eggs. What we really should be considering are the broader welfare issues in the egg industry. From living conditions that are cramped and unsanitary to the routine mutilation of chickens, such as de-beaking, the egg industry raises serious concerns about how animals are treated.
In this blog post, we'll explore why keeping backyard chickens as a response to the egg shortage is not a solution to the problem, and why it's crucial to understand the welfare issues in the egg industry instead.
The staff of the Broken Shovels Farm Sanctuary, a sanctuary for homeless, abused, neglected, slaughter-bound animals, put together what they have seen and experienced when it comes to adopting and breeding animals for our needs. Here is the plea to stop buying chicks for eggs (see below):
READ BEFORE YOU BUY CHICKS!
We’ve all seen the hundreds of memes, heard the grumbling and watched the news reports about the price of eggs. You may get a wild hair and decide backyard chicken keeping is the thing to do, and rush out to go buy some peeping, adorable baby chicks. I get it, my lady friends…it’s like the ultimate peer pressure these days.
But I’m begging you, DON’T DO IT. If you’re here, you probably love animals. After 15 years of chicken rescue, PLEASE hear me out. Buying chicks is NOT compatible with loving animals. It’s just not.
1. It’s expensive.
Before the costs of a coop large enough to offer enrichment and stimulation suitable for intelligent and curious animals, medical care with an avian/exotics vet that can run $4-500 for a single visit with diagnostics, and everything you need to keep truly happy, healthy birds, just the cost of feed alone will be MORE per dozen of eggs when you factor in the months they won’t lay in the winter and the years when they’ll still need care after they lay infrequently or not at all. Why are store eggs cheaper? They can buy feed in huge bulk discounts AND they “depopulate” ie kill the hens when they are 16-18 months old, once they are no longer able to lay daily eggs. Crossing that threshold where you’d kill an animal because you can no longer use them requires you to give up your “animal lover” card for sure.
2. It’s hard work.
Cleaning coops a few times a week, all the dust and caustic bird dander for those of us with allergies, finding a place to toss your used shaving. Poop EVERYWHERE. Dug up lawns and flowerbeds. Twice daily feeding and watering, keeping overgrown nails and beaks trimmed, deworming, mite and lice treatments and trips to the vet take many hours per week that most busy people don’t have. These are living beings and just like your dog or cat, not giving them adequate space, housing, clean facilities and vet care is neglect. Animal lovers don’t neglect animals in their care.
3. Avian flu.
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza is sweeping the country and killing millions of birds, both pet and wild. Threatened species populations are suffering, and raptors like hawks and eagles are falling out of the sky, dead and dying. It’s even jumped to mammal species, killing bears and big cats in zoos around the country. The more animals we give this disease to spread, like the millions of sudden backyard chickens, the more we help it spread, and in effect are responsible for even more wild animals dying. Animal lovers don’t do things that harm wildlife.
**Not to mention that it CAN be spread to humans in close contact with birds. In the cases around the world where it has spread to poultry workers and those exposed, it has had a more than 50% mortality rate. The more we expose our own species to this disease, the more readily it will adapt to infecting humans. And the only reason we’ve been safe so far is that it can only spread from bird to human. But this is a quickly mutating virus, and when it is able to spread human to human, we will have another pandemic that will be more virulent than Covid. The 1918 influenza likely originated as an avian flu.
4. Predators.
We tend not to notice our city predator wildlife friends, and they usually leave our companion animals alone. But they can’t resist the dinner bell of captive backyard chickens and the often shoddy hobbyist coops and runs from feed stores with the glaring lack of predator protection they offer. We spend thousands of dollars on predator proof housing and runs for each flock, that requires sturdy sheds, an underlayment that prevents digging under fences and a cover of some sort. Every year we receive hundreds of messages from traumatized chicken owners who come out to find gore and devastation in their coops, often one or two injured, very grisly survivors. It’s almost a guarantee that new chicken owners will experience a predator attack. Are you ready for that guilt and heartbreak? Animal lovers don’t keep captive animals to be mutilated.
5. Roosters.
You may be reassured that you’re buying “sexed” chicks, just hens when you purchase baby chicks. It says so right on the sign right? Well, what they DON’T tell you is 10-30% of those chicks have been mis-sexed and about half of buyers end up with a rooster. It becomes agonizing every year as families who live in cities where roosters are banned try to find a home for him where he won’t be killed. It’s so sad to take him away from the hens and people he’s bonded with. And we receive over 3000 of those rooster rehome requests every year, more than we could ever care for. There are a few places that advertise a “gentleman’s club” where you can dump your little boy off with their rooster flocks for a nominal fee like $50. Anyone running a business like this would quickly be over run or go broke trying to feed all these boys, unless they have a way to discard some or neglect them horribly. What actually happens is most will be killed by other more dominant roosters in the flock or fall prey to the many diseases endemic to unquarantined flocks with no medical care offered. And eventually when they grow up, they are sold off cheaply to someone who will home butcher them. We’ve visited a few. It’s obvious what’s going on. It’s far more kind to take your rooster in for HUMANE EUTHANASIA with an avian vet than to leave them stressed, sick and attacked in these places. Animal lovers don’t buy animals they can’t keep.
6. Chick grinding.
Ok, so you bought just 6 hens and you got lucky—all are ACTUALLY hens. But since it was a 50/50 gender split on that hatch, where are their brothers? Egg laying breeds don’t gain weight quickly so it’s not profitable to raise them for food. Instead, all the male chicks are either suffocated in giant plastic bags of thousands of chicks or they are thrown alive into something called a “chick macerator”, basically an industrial grinder for baby chickens. EVERY HATCHERY does this. There are no exceptions. Lots of people who also eat chickens may not be bothered by this, but many find killing day old baby animals abhorrent. I don’t know how we can call ourselves animal lovers and be willing to pay for this to happen, as we do each time we buy a little girl chick.
7. Death in the mail.
All the chicks in those feed stores have been sent in the mail, at a day old, with no food, water or warmth they need. MANY chicks will die en route, and it will be a cold and scary ordeal for these little tiny animals even if they do survive. Every year, we get calls from feed stores asking us to come help the sick and dying babies who’ve arrived who need critical care. Sometimes entire shipments come in deceased. Can you imagine if we did this with puppies and kittens knowing there’s a very good chance they’d die in transit? There is nothing nice about the way we transport baby chickens. Animal lovers don’t put animals in traumatizing and unsafe situations.
8. Needs a mama.
Baby chickens, ducks and turkeys are unique in the bird world because they hatch with the ability to eat on their own, they don’t have to be fed by a mama bird. BUT! That does NOT mean they have no need for a mother. Living without a mother causes constant anxiety for a baby animal whose instinct is telling him that not being near his mother makes him vulnerable to predation. Their mothers are comfort, warmth, love, affection and teach them about how to be chickens. Just because they CAN live without a mother, doesn’t mean it isn’t cruel to force millions of babies to live without her. The few minutes or even hours a day you can spend with your baby chicks isn’t anywhere near sufficient for an animal who would stay at her parents side 24-7 for 6-8 weeks or longer. Hatchery chicks are born in industrial incubators with fake heat, and there’s nothing “natural” about this in the least. This, to me, may be the meanest thing we do to animals on a large scale. The industrialization of the lives of babies is truly monstrous. Animal lovers don’t intentionally take newborns from their mothers.
What to do instead:
If you still feel you NEED chicken companionship, build the Fort Knox of chicken habitats either inside or outside your house (chicken diapers are a thing), make their lives and enrichment a priority, find a great avian vet, be willing to spend money on their care, and ADOPT adult hens DON’T shop.
Sick of egg prices? There are so many plant based egg products on the market these days that cook just like eggs. Find a great tofu scramble recipe. Check out all the easy egg replacements for baking that are far more healthy, like applesauce, bananas, and flax seed.
Broken Shovels Farm Sanctuary (US)
We provide sanctuary for abused, neglected, unwanted farm animals and a safe place to share their love and their voice with our human visitors.
Juliane Priesemeister, Executive Director
Juliane worked almost a decade for an international corporation as an information designer. Generating compelling visual stories was her daily deed, but as much as she enjoyed the creative work the big corporation environment left her hungry for substance and impact.
When she started her yoga journey a few years ago the “do no harm” philosophy pushed her to align work with her personal ethics and values. Today she uses her omnibus skill set, including marketing communications, economics, and graphic design, to reveal the truth about the egg industry to consumers.
