Tag: domestication

“Persistent Ovulator”

Many people who don’t understand why eggs can never be an ethical foodstuff for humans are surprised to learn that selective breeding for egg laying has made modern hens prone to cancer and other reproductive diseases. As such, medical researchers are using hens as models for studies into ovarian cancer in humans.:

The domestic laying chicken has been intensely selected to be a persistent ovulator. That is, the tendency for broodiness has been nearly eliminated and, given the appropriate lighting and nutrition, many strains of laying hens produce an egg on almost every day. […] Commercial laying hens also spontaneously develop ovarian cancer at a high rate, and susceptibility to this disease has been associated with ovulatory events in women.

Think about all that for a second.

Hens are forced by genetic manipulation to lay eggs so frequently that they are highly predisposed to reproductive cancers. The thing they were bred to do for humans will likely kill them.

Of course, hens die from lots of other things, too, as their reproductive system breaks down; this is why most hens do not live beyond 4-5 years…which is also the age they mostly stop laying. Those chickenly problems aren’t quite as useful for humans, apparently…

Equally awful, as the Poultry Science abstract cited above also makes clear, humans have bred OUT the mothering instinct in most hens because it interfered with egg laying.

Put another way, hens don’t even get the chance to experience motherhood…because nothing in their hijacked biology compels them to.

Every time someone eats an egg, these are the things that are being supported and normalized.

That’s part of why eggs don’t “just happen,” and why laying hens can never be truly “happy” when you steal the object of their suffering.

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The U.S. Meat Animal Research Center and the Torture of Domestication

The New York Times recently published a disturbing expose of the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a tax-payer-funded testing facility run the by federal government that is seeking to create bigger, better, more productive versions of farmed animals.

The NYT story is utterly horrifying in what it reveals about the callous treatment of individual animals–from hormone injections that spur faster, bigger growth, to selective breeding for greater litter sizes. to abandoning unwanted babies and allowing them to die. And much, much more. As the article states:

Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.

Then there are the lambs. In an effort to develop “easy care” sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.

One days' worth of eggs from TCA hens = the number of eggs laid per year by their wild ancestor.
One days’ worth of eggs from the former backyard hens at Triangle Chance for All’s Microsanctuary roughly equals the number of eggs laid per year by one of their wild ancestors.
This pathological abuse is horrible and cannot be justified. Period. Yet the reality of the situation is that these obvious tortures are not restricted to “factory” farming; they are inextricably connected to every farmed animal, no matter where they are living or how they are treated. Practically all farmed animals today grow at certain rates (like the “broiler” chickens raised for meat who are killed at six weeks old, long after they have become crippled by their own bulk), have certain numbers of babies, lay a certain number of eggs–all as a result of human manipulation–through selective breeding and more invasive genetic tinkering.

The resident hens at Triangle Chance for All are perfect examples. Almost all of them came from backyard flocks (not battery cages or “free-range/cage-free” farms), and each will lay between 250 and 300 eggs per year, unlike her wild ancestors, who lays between 10 and 15 eggs per year. All domesticated hens are victims of their own hijacked biology, and most will die well before their time because of this. In the case of other animals, their premature deaths typically come at the hands of a human–either because their flesh is desired, or their productivity (and thus their usefulness) has waned.

We can try to stave off this death, but there is only so much we can do. The only true way to stop the suffering of future generations is to go vegan and end the demand for ALL animal products, and if possible we can liberate animals from the oppression in which they live. But by going vegan, we take a huge step away from this endless torture by ending the demand for the altered, exploited bodies of the mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.

(Originally published at Vegan Publishers.)