Egg are not lovely
An American animal advocacy organization, Mercy For Animals, has been able to gain undercover footage of the practices of commercial chicken hatcheries. Please watch and if you are not yet vegan, think about what your money supports the next time you buy an egg or a product containing egg. 
…lovely.
Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the shocking reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery – Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa.
New hidden camera footage obtained at this facility during a Mercy For Animals undercover investigation gives a disturbing glimpse into the cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries.
The warm, comforting, and protective wings of these newly hatched chicks’ mothers have been replaced with massive machines, quickly moving conveyor belts, harsh handling, and distressing noise. These young animals are sorted, discarded, and handled like mere cogs in a machine.
For the nearly 150,000 male chicks who hatch every 24 hours at this Hy-Line facility, their lives begin and end the same day. Grabbed by their fragile wings by workers known as “sexers,” who separate males from females, these young animals are callously thrown into chutes and hauled away to their deaths. They are destined to die on day one because they cannot produce eggs and do not grow large or fast enough to be raised profitably for meat. Their lives are cut short when they are dropped into a grinding machine – tossed around by a spinning auger before being torn to pieces by a high-pressure macerator.
Over 30 million male chicks meet their fate this way each year at this facility.
For the surviving females, this is the beginning of a life of cruelty and confinement at the hands of the egg industry. Before even leaving the hatchery they will be snapped by their heads into a spinning debeaker – a portion of their sensitive beaks removed by a laser. Workers toss and rummage through them before they are placed 100 per crowded box and shipped across the country.
Remainder of article at MFA
Thanks for sharing this. It’s a prime example of the things that go on, hidden away. People often cling on to romantic, rural ideas of animal treatment, and never consider the respetless way in which their food is really treated. This is chicks, treated as objects, and it has to be investigated undecover as the industry knows it’s horriffic. It’s no different for cows, pigs, or anything else. People have to face this, and wake up if change is ever to occur.
check this out
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ammut/3997946010/
Let me clear. I grew up on a farm, I have no problem killing and eating animals. Deer, Elk, cows, chickens whatever. After all, Jesus did. However, I grew up on a small farm with my Grandfather. It was not a commercial farm so when we slaughtered an animal it was like 1 or maybe 2 at a time. I am going somewhere I promise. Let me be clear on another thing, I despise liberals, tree huggers who ruined the entire town I lived in. I will meet any of those spike tapping hippys at the border of my property any day. All that being said, I recently have joined Easter Orthodox Christianity which happens to be much more active in fasting than any Protestant church I have ever attended. My wife’s Godmother is a sort of nature-path and also a Chiropractic Doctor. She knows all about the hormones and stuff put in well, pretty much everything it seems. I also have to say my attitude toward Vegans has changed thanks to Great Lent. Anything Vegan also happens to be “Lent friendly” as we like to say. It is expensive, but to be honest, we dont eat nearly as much during Lent anyway. As much as I am craving one, I have to admit, the thought of how much food and calories a tripple whopper supersized has in it! Do people really need that much food? And then that lady on tv who is trying to make herself 1000 pounds on purpose! To be in world records. I am approaching almost 50 days now of no meat (other than shellfish, spineless fish). It is starting to get hard… very hard. I cant help to wonder how Vegans do this. I suppose doing it as a spiritual discipline rather than because of an aversion to killing animals makes some difference? Anyway, at least I don’t make fun of Vegans and Vegetarians any more. I also think it would do people good to lay off eating so much meat. Its a good exercise in general and people might be surprised. If that happened, there might not be a demand for commercial meat as smaller farms that care and love their animals and treat them humanly and dont put crap in them could supply the need. Just a thought, in the “meat people 1/2 way” tradition. LOL. Get it? I also have lost about 15 pounds. In three weeks!
I am always grateful that the investigative journalists are out there to cover the quotidian facts about the systems on which we depend. It’s amazing that churning hundreds of thousands of living creatures through a grinder every day can be legal when there’s money to be made out of it (but kicking your dog and letting your neighbour see you do it is not).
I’m not sure that the video should immediately compel me towards veganism. I buy free-range eggs but I don’t know whether the standard practice is to destroy the males and give the females better living conditions or if they avoid killing the males. Still, it does provide a good riposte to those who have said, “I can see why someone would go vegetarian, but vegan seems a bit extreme”. Surely ones objections to the cruelty of battery hen conditions couldn’t be stronger than similar objections to destroying male chicks as shown in the video.