The Egg Industry's History of Deceiving Consumers

Awareness of the horrors of egg factory farms has increased substantially in the last 10 years. United Egg Producers (UEP), the industry's main trade organization, responded to this concern by slapping a label reading “Animal Care Certified” on each carton of eggs. The “certification” was meant to whitewash the industry's tarnished image. It still permitted all the worst abuses, including allowing factory farmers to cut off hens' sensitive beaks with a hot blade, cram six or seven hens into tiny battery cages where they can't spread even one wing, and house them in filthy sheds with more than 100,000 other birds.¹⁷ Compassion Over Killing, a Washington, D.C.-based animal rights group, successfully used legal action to force United Egg Producers to remove the “Animal Care Certified" label. Instead of treating hens better, however, the UEP has now begun using a new misleading label that reads, “United Egg Producers Certified: Produced in Compliance With United Egg Producers' Animal Husbandry Guidelines.” This label still permits the exact same horrible treatment of hens.¹⁸

Cage-Free and Free-Range Chickens Used for Eggs

Although many consumers believe that labels such as free-range, free-roaming, or cage-free mean that these chickens spend their days in natural outdoor settings, the label means something entirely different to the egg industry.

Hens on commercial cage-free farms are not kept in cages, but they still have their sensitive beaks cut off with a hot blade and are crammed together in filthy sheds where they will live for years until their egg production wanes and they're sent to slaughter. They never go outside, breathe fresh air, feel the sun on their backs, or do anything else that is natural or important to them. They suffer from the same lung lesions and ammonia burns as hens in cages, and they have breast blisters to add to their suffering.

Although hens in cage-free systems are clearly better off than hens in cages—just imagine a cat or dog living in a tiny cage for two years with five to six other cats or dogs and never leaving that cage until it's time for slaughter—their bodily condition can actually be worse because they are taken from cages and plopped down in their own excrement for years at a time. This does not mean that cages are good, which the industry might claim, but from an animal welfare perspective, “cage-free” means “much better but still extraordinarily cruel.”

Reports from people who have visited free-range egg farms indicate that conditions are no different in these systems. While free-range and organic egg farms are technically supposed to give birds outdoor access, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has decided that “they may be temporarily confined” for “reasons of health, safety, the animal's stage of production or to protect soil or water quality.” ¹⁹ This loophole is big enough to drive a truck through, and the owners of many free-range egg farms take full advantage of it by almost never allowing the birds outside. At a Horizon Foods organic and free-range farm, the hen sheds house more than 400,000 birds—hardly a small, natural, family-run business. Style Weekly reported that “when you pull into the parking lot, there is not a chicken to be seen or a cluck to be heard. To the left of the lot stands the egg-processing plant. To the right, five long windowless 'chicken houses.' Except for the sound of an American flag snapping in the wind, all is silent.”²⁰ Scott Akom, general manager of the Horizon farm, freely admitted that the hens do not see the light of day, and he refused to allow the reporter to actually see any of the free-range birds. He said that all of his free-range hens were currently kept in sheds, telling the reporter, “Free-roaming and cage-free mean the same thing. The chickens are free to go wherever they want. Inside the chicken house.”²¹ When birds are given outdoor access, it's usually for very short periods of time, and the outdoor area often just consists of a hole cut in the shed wall leading to a small, muddy enclosure.

Male chicks who are born on organic or free-range egg farms are crushed to death or stuffed into garbage bags and left to suffocate because they don't produce eggs and are of no use to the industry. A report in E magazine explained the reality behind this misleading label: “If people got the full story, I would hope they would choose not to consume eggs at all. It's intrinsically problematic to raise chickens for egg consumption. Male chicks are thrown away, even in small-scale operations, since they don't lay eggs. That's 50 percent of the chicks that are destroyed.”²²

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¹⁷ Animal Care Certified.
¹⁸ Compassion Over Killing, "Victory: COK Wins 'Animal Care Certified' Campaign," 27 Mar. 2006.
¹⁹ U.S. Department of Agriculture, "The National Organic Program: Organic Production and Handling Standards," Oct. 2002, 27 Mar. 2006.
²⁰ Laura LaFay, "Into the Frying Pan," Style Weekly 14 Apr. 2004.
²¹ LaFay.
²² Starre Vartan, "Happy Eggs," E/The Environmental Magazine May-Jun. 2003.