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Male chicks in the egg industry don’t get to experience much of anything during their tragically short lives, other than a brief glimpse of a brutal reality followed by a terrifying death. Why is this? Well, because egg laying hens have been selectively bred to lay an unnaturally large number of eggs. And, about one-half of the chicks who are bred for “egg-layers” are born male. These male babies will never lay eggs and have not been bred to grow fast enough to be considered viable to raise for their “meat”. As a result, these male baby chicks are “discarded” right after hatching, by the hundreds of millions every year, most commonly by being ground-up alive in “macerators” or dumped into large plastic bags where they slowly suffocate and die. This horrific cruelty applies to *all* eggs – regardless of any “free-range”, “organic”, “cage-free” or other humane-washed marketing labels. Indeed, any commoditizing of animals inevitably leads to great cruelties. There’s no way around it. How wrong is all of this, since we have no need to eat any eggs or other animal foods? If you don’t like the idea of animal cruelty, then – at a minimum – please go vegan. Anything less is directly supporting and paying for these very cruelties. |