Thought I’d start populating this sub. Seems nice!
So, say you rescue chickens or raise them yourself without the intention of eating them. And they just live their lives and lay unfertilized eggs, e.g. eggs that will never become chickens. And the hen just lays them. Would it be alright to eat the eggs since they’re the equivalent of menstruation?
You do have to do all kinds of little hocus pocus to make the hen produce a useful amount of eggs. It includes having a fake egg in their nest all the time and other little things. Without those, the chicken would lay less eggs.
Being pregnant is a huge task for the body, and when the chicken makes the egg, it puts in basically all the resources it would need to put if the egg was actually fertile. If it didn’t need to lay so many eggs, its life would probably be more relaxed. And without human interference, it would lay far less eggs.
And then, of course, if the hen is fed with food grown elsewhere, it would be better for the climate if the hen did not exist.
How much weight these arguments have is another thing :) Depends probably on what you’d be doing otherwise, if you completely stopped eating eggs.
What’s wrong with eggs if it does not harm the hen?
Do you have any source or information for this? From everything I read its actually better for the hen to let them keep the eggs.
I don’t have a source because I’m asking the question so I don’t know…
Okay I thought you used the questions as rhetorical devices in your argument. For me tge way you formulated it seemed like you were sure about it or atleast that its your opinion.
Not saying its the best article, but its one about this topic: https://freefromharm.org/farm-animal-welfare/backyard-chickens-expanding-understanding-harm/
Most relevant part for me:
What Do We Do With the Eggs If We Don’t Eat Them?
When we let go of the anthropocentric notion that chickens’ eggs belong to us, then what could we potentially do with the eggs, if we instead wanted to do something to benefit these most exploited of birds? Well, we can hard boil the eggs and grind up the shells. We can add the shells to the chickens’ grit to give them back some of the vast amounts of calcium that is leached from their bones to produce all of those shells. We can also feed their eggs back to them in order to restore some of the protein and other nutrients they lose in the process of laying far more eggs than their bodies were ever intended to produce.
Humans don’t consume the shells anyway, so that aspect is compatible with humans consuming the contents of the egg. Feeding the egg shells to the chickens is indeed a good idea so they get back the lost calcium.
As for the contents of the egg-- I had not heard of that practice of feeding that to the birds as well. I guess this leaves some more questions:
- is the diet sufficiently balanced if you feed /all/ the eggs back to the bird that produced them?
- if you just leave the eggs alone, will the bird naturally decide on its own to consume them? Or does a human need to prepare them as bird feed in some way?
My unresearched knee-jerk speculation is that it would benefit the birds most to swap some of the eggs for other foods.
Thanks
