New Investigation Cracks Open More Cruelty at Top U.S. Egg Producer

The Cal-Maine Foods website declares, "When it comes to eggs, we're at the center of it all." They're at the center of the latest recall of another quarter million eggs. They're at the center of a class action lawsuit around an egg price-fixing scheme. And now, they're at the center of the Humane Society of the United States' latest undercover investigation.

Cal-Maine roosts at the top of the egg industry, with nearly 30 million laying hens crammed into facilities around the country. The National Consumers League called the footage captured by the HSUS investigator "both heatbreaking and indefensible."

The investigation at Cal-Maine's Waelder, Texas facility revealed overcrowded cages where hens spend their lives unable to spread their wings, on wire flooring that makes their feet bleed. Birds get caught in the wiring, where they die from dehydration or starvation just inches from their water and food. Carcasses were left in the cages for days, sometimes so long that they became mummified.

Where have we seen conditions like this before? Oh, right ... in every undercover factory farm investigation that's been released, including the one HSUS did a few months ago at facilities of the second and third largest egg producers.

The industry crows about their so-called animal welfare standards. But as HSUS President and CEO, Wayne Pacelle says, it is fundamentally inhumane to confine an animal for her entire life in a space no larger than two-thirds of a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. And when you have five employees responsible for a million animals, like Cal-Maine's Waelder facility does, it is impossible to monitor their condition, let alone provide any sort of decent life for them.

Confined in cages, the birds don't get to engage in any natural behaviors like stretching their limbs, nesting, dustbathing, or even pecking at pests like flies and rodents to keep infestations at bay. In one barn, the fly infestation was so bad that the investigator reported "it sounded like he was walking on Rice Krispies" when moving through there. A pipe that brought manure-flushing water into several barns had been broken for a week, so sewage trenches overflowed onto the barn floors.

This is not just a disgusting way to treat other living creatures; it also poses food safety problems. An egg that came from the pro-lapsed uterus of a de-beaked hen and then rolled down the conveyor belt, covered in blood and manure, bumping along chicken carcasses that had fallen between the bars of the battery cages, isn't just unappetizing ... makes it seem pretty obvious how we ended up with this summer's salmonella outbreak (and amazing that it wasn't much worse).

As Wayne Pacelle aptly put it: "the time for just leaving it up to industry and thinking everything is acceptable has passed."

The salmonella outbreak, which was the largest food safety problem in recent years, was a bit of a wake-up call for government regulators. Unfortunately, they seem to have hit the snooze button because the Food and Drug Administration's Egg Safety Rule doesn't address battery cages.

In addition to calling on Cal-Maine to immediately start phasing out battery cages, and asking retailers to make the switch to procuring only cage-free eggs, the Humane Society of the United States is calling on the FDA to acknowledge the link between confinement systems and salmonella and revise their rules to phase-out battery cages across the country.

On a personal level, you can choose not to support cruel egg production and share these investigations that pull back the curtain on factory farms. But we need more than that, because this type of systemic suffering is not going to disappear overnight. The least we can do is give hundreds of millions of hens a slightly better life out of the cage, where they can move around and engage in natural behaviors.

Ask the FDA to revise the egg safety rule to include a phase-out of battery cages to help end this industrialized animal cruelty.

Photo credit: The Humane Society of the United States