Apologies for the title – I figured it would make for good SEO. Though I guess it may not exactly attract quality traffic 😀
As I’m sure you’re aware, social media, blog posts and real life are rife right now with images of cute, yellow, fluffy chicks. A symbol of Easter, spring, and new life, you cannot go through March and April without seeing them somewhere. We ‘awwww’ at them and fantasise about having the chick in front of us for real so we can pet it. Of course we find them adorable as all hell. Who doesn’t?
Try the egg industry.
Quite apart from the wretched life that egg-laying hens have; to the egg industry baby male chicks are just a useless by-product. As they will never be egg-layers, it is not profitable to keep them, and they are not good for meat. Thus, millions of baby male chicks are killed every day, in one of three brutal ways. They are either gassed to death; put into a meat grinder alive (this seems to be the most common method of killing); or they are put in a dumpster, all on top of each other so they suffocate.
(This vid isn’t too graphic, but of course it’s not pleasant)
This happens if the eggs are battery, free-range, cage-free and even organic.
Worldwide, billions of male chicks are killed each year in this manner.
Look, I don’t want to point fingers here, or poop all over Easter. Most people don’t know about this – it’s not exactly advertised, so I am not judging those who eat eggs, and not calling anyone out as a hypocrite. My goal here is to reveal the bigger picture to those of us who haven’t seen it, so we can make more informed choices.
Doesn’t is seem nonsensical that we pay (through the money we spend when we buy eggs) for the needless slaughter of billions of chicks every year; yet at Easter we love looking at pictures of them, or even buying fluffy toy chicks for our Easter tables?
Also, would we let this happen to kittens or puppies?
Of course as a vegan, I think all animal slaughter is unnecessary. But even though I am used to reading about the cruelty inflicted on ‘food’ animals, and even though I’ve seen my fair share of slaughterhouse footage, the sheer volume of life killed as a waste product in the egg industry has me reeling.
And the mental image of someone gushing over a baby chick pic on Twitter this week, while eating their breakfast boiled egg or omelette, makes me crazy. Not because this person is being hypocritical – you can only be hypocritical if you KNOW the fate of baby male chicks and go ahead and gush at the photo anyway. It makes me crazy because this mass slaughter is just not widely known, and therefore the irony is not realized by many.
Isn’t it better to make a choice whether to eat a product or not based on all the information?
Of course we should enjoy any photos of baby chicks that come across our paths in the days to come; it’s a fun and beautiful time of year. But let’s just have no illusions about the destiny that many of them face.