trish123: Theres stuff in modern chickens which renders then virtually unrecognisable from the ones we used to know - apart from the drugs theyre fed, they are mostly raised never seeing daylight or pecking at a grub on the ground - sorry but Im gonna have to resort to copy n paste here...;
The modern hen laying eggs for human consumption is far removed from the Burmese jungle fowl from whom she derives and the active farmyard fowl of recent memory. Rather, she is an anxious, frustrated, fear-ridden bird forced to spend 10 to 12 months squeezed inside a small wire cage with three to eight or nine other tormented hens amid tiers of identical cages in gloomy sheds holding 50,000 to 125,000 debeaked, terrified, bewildered birds. By nature an energetic forager, she should be ranging by day, perching at night, and enjoying cleansing dust baths with her flock mates--a need so strong that she pathetically executes "vacuum" dust bathing on the wire floor of her cage.
Caged for life without exercise while constantly drained of calcium to form egg shells, battery hens develop the severe osteoporosis of intensive confinement know as caged layer fatigue. Calcium depleted, millions of hens become paralyzed and die of hunger and thirst inches from their food and water.
In the 20th century, the combined genetic, management, and chemical manipulations of the small Leghorn hen have produced a bird capable of laying an abnormal number of large eggs--250 a year in contrast to the one or two clutches of about a dozen per clutch laid by her wild relatives. The laying of an egg has been degraded by the battery system to a squalid discharge so humiliating that ethologist Konrad Lorenz compared it to humans forced to defecate in each others' presence. Researchers have described the futile efforts of caged hens to build nests and their frantic efforts to escape the cage by jumping at the bars right up to the laying of the egg. Battery hens suffer from the reproductive maladies that afflict female birds deprived of exercise: masses and bits of eggs clog their oviducts which become inflamed and paralyzed; eggs are formed that are too big to be laid; uteruses "prolapse," pushing through the vagina of small birds forced to strain day after day to expel huge eggs. The battery cage has created an ugly new disease of laying hens called fatty liver hemorrhagic syndrome, characterized by an enlarged, fat, friable liver covered with blood clots, and pale combs and wattles covered with dandruff. In recent decades, hens' oviducts have become infested with salmonellae bacteria that enter the forming egg causing food poisoning in consumers. Disease and suffering are innate features of the battery system in which the individual hen is obscured by gloom and thousands of other hens in an environment deliberately designed to discourage perception, labor, and care.
This emoticon befits this desription !!
I was arguing with a friend a few months back over veg and nonveg ... in short he said ' eggs ' in todays times are vegetarian and its another " industy " or rather " farming "
I was furious that he called it farming and an industry. I was trying to explain that making a hen pathetically multiplicatedly perform what is a natural process i.e. egg laying is going to be tormenting on the bird etc. He vehemently disagreed.......
Now i know the details ... Thanks Trish ...
