Debeaked Baby Chick
(possibly its toes are cut off too)

Do You Purchase These Eggs? (1)

– Female baby chicks are debeaked.  It is a very painful process and affects their ability to eat food as adult hens.

– Baby chicks have their toes cut off at a very young age. 

– The baby male chicks are thrown into large plastic bags where they are smothered to death.

– The baby male chicks are ground-up by machinery and fed back to the mother hens as food.

– 95 percent of laying hens spend their entire lives in tiny cages

– Each hen is given about 67-76 square inches of space (a sheet of paper measures 94 square inches).

– Conditions are so crowded the hens cannot reach water or food and therefore die of starvation or dehydration.

– Imagine spending your entire life in a wire cage the size of your bathtub with four other people.

– The hen’s bones deteriorate due to lack of movement.

– The hen’s feet become lacerated causing infection, pain and oftentimes a slow death without medical treatment.

– Many hens have their feet trapped on the metal cages where they die of starvation & dehydration.

– The hen’s skeletal systems become so weak that their spinal cords deteriorate.  They become paralyzed.

– Hens will suffer new broken bones as they’re ripped from their cages when they are killed for meat.

– They never perch, forage, take a dust bath, nest, or explore their surroundings.

– Hens suffer from “cage fatigue,” where living birds forced to stand on the rotting, mummified carcasses of their dead cage-mates.

– Their lives are categorized by unmitigated mental suffering.

Footnotes:

(1) “The Cruelest of All Factory Farm Products: Eggs From Caged Hens” Bruce Friedrich, Senior Director for Strategic Initiates, Farm Sanctuary, 1/14/2013 for the Huff Post.  Most bulleted items are excerpts from this source.