The Undercover Hatchery Investigation--Not Just for "Factory Farms"

Mercy for Animals' undercover investigation into what happens at hatcheries for the egg industry, about which I told you yesterday, has been getting lots of attention, via mainstream news and blogs and animal rights blogs alike. But one terribly frustrating aspect of reading some of the mainstream blog coverage and comments has been these repeated themes: "Well, this is another reason not to buy industrial eggs"; "I buy free-range, so I'm proud to say I'm not a part of this"; "If you buy local, this doesn't happen."

Not true. Many seem to be missing the point that hatcheries supply free-range operations, "local" egg producers, feed stores, and backyard hobbyists with their hens too; hens exploited for eggs, no matter where you're buying the eggs, come almost entirely from hatcheries that do exactly what the video shows.

This is not a factory farming problem. This is an animal agriculture, eating-of-eggs problem, even if you're buying "free-range."

My fellow animal advocates, this is yet another example in a long line of many of why the intense focus on "factory farming" needs to not be so intense. Most people fail to realize that many of the worst cruelties and injustices of animal agriculture actually happen across the board, at (and for) operations large and small alike, so the prevailing progressive attitude right now is "factory farming: bad; 'free-range' and local: good." That so many people are watching this video and merely wagging their fingers at industrial, factory farming--before going right back to eating their scrambled free-range eggs, for which these very same cruelties and more happened--is a problem. That people even still fail to realize that free-range hens (and "organic" dairy cows and so on and so on) at a young age still face the same gruesome slaughter as "factory farmed" animals is a problem.

We need to be clear: factory farming is horrendous, but the compassionate alternative to factory farming is not smaller-scale farming that, despite its comforting labels, still involves many of the very same cruelties in addition to, obviously, the equally unnecessary killing; the compassionate alternative is not eating the animals and their milk and eggs at all.

See "'Free-Range' Poultry and Eggs" from United Poultry Concerns for more.

Below, see some of my fellow animal rights bloggers' posts on the release of the video and investigation:

• Hy-Line Hatcheries, Industry Gold from Animal Place Sanctuary
• New Investigation Exposes the Horrors of Egg Production from Striking at the Roots
• Video Exposes Egg Industry's Tiniest Victims from Digging Through the Dirt
• The Unavoidable Tragedy of Eggs from Liberation BC

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Image of trashed male chicks courtesy Animals Voice, via UPC; one alternative to grinding the male chicks alive is just to throw the tiny baby birds into plastic trash bags (periodically cramming them down to make room for more), crushing and suffocating them.