1729:
It’s worth knowing the story of the caged
hen. Perhaps I should let her speak for herself:
"What exactly is it you don’t like
about hens? Keeping us pressed behind metal bars like this. It hurts. There’s
no room to move and the ammonia rising from our excrement makes it hard to
breathe. There’s no fresh air in the shed we’re kept in. There are thousands of
us crammed into tiny cages. We lay an egg nearly every day of the year for
about one and a half years, then we’re taken to the processing plant.
"You saw on TV the other day a story
about egg-laying. You used the word “disgusting” when you saw those batteries
of cages in the shed. Nasty sight eh? One shot showed a hens claws grown around
the wire-mesh floor so she couldn’t even lift it. Another shot showed a dead
hen in the cage being used as something soft for other hens to lie on, and lay
on.
"Maybe it caught you by surprise.
Sitting there in front of your TVs. There was a lot of shaking of heads in
disbelief, and some drawn-in breaths, and a few despairing hand gestures. But
there wasn’t much more happening. You
didn’t say “No more eggs for me”.
"So much for all that disgust and
shaking of heads. What did it mean? Probably not very much at all.
"I suppose you’d sometimes like to
boast, “I’m a Vegetarian – I abhor all killing?”. Well, let me tell you,
vegetarianism isn’t just about not eating meat. Eggs are all about killing too,
and worse. When we hens don’t lay enough eggs, they throw us into crates and
take us off to the killing factory, which doesn’t sound too bad when it’s
called a ‘processing plant’. Then they hang us upside down by our thin spindly
legs and send us on a conveyor into a prickly trough of high voltage water that
stiffens every nerve in our body, so they can
position our necks for the final cut, a set of sharp revolving blades.
And that’s the end.
"Can you believe this happens? No?
Well, let me tell you, it’s been this way for a long time, the egg business has
pioneered the ultimate cruelty, from caged hell to the terror of the killing
machines. And YOU don’t care, because here you are, all seated around the
breakfast table, tucking in to your breakfast eggs, with no thought for us poor
birds.
"We suffer unimaginably, from birth to
death. We girls almost envy our brothers who were thrown, live, into the
grinding machine, on Day One. At least their agony wasn’t prolonged. They never
had to experience the terrible suffering we went through for the twenty or so
months of our lives".
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