people who think its unethical to eat chicken eggs are like people who think bees should keep all their honey. they literally produce more than they need and your unwillingness to even buy local means you are doing nothing to help them, support your small farmers you heathens

This is not true.

1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.

2) chickens have been artificially selected from naturally producing eggs once a month to producing eggs every couple of days. Their bodies are not sustainable and the health complications of this rapid egg production kills chickens.

Hey idk who like. Lied to you about the way honey farms work, but could you stop spreading misinformation? Are you a beekeeper?

Because I am!

Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.

But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.

Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.

I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.

If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeminist research on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).

But yeah! Stop spreading misinformation! Please 🐝

Also if I can harp on the chicken part?

Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.

Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.

THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS

Many people take to raising their own hens because of America’s immoral treatment of hens in factory farms like you’re not helping the poor chicks by starving these farmers financially you’re just hurting the one people trying to change things and making the OPTION of cage free organic cruelty free eggs even harder to find

First of all, chickens didn’t ever “lay one egg a month” because they’re clutch layers. Not only that, but many chicken folk are raising heritage breeds, not commercial hens,. Your average commercial production hen (leghorns, Isa browns, etc) produce 5-6 eggs per week, laying an egg a day (which is actually how junglefowl, ie wild chickens, lay. The difference is that jungle fowl lay their clutch and then brood). Heritage breeds often don’t because they haven’t been bred for egg production, they’ve been bred out of a sense of heritage. Older breeds our ancestors around the world kept for various reasons. Often these breeds are the ones that lay 3-4 eggs in a week instead of daily, which is less often than wild fowl when it’s laying season. In addition, several heritage breeds are being kept for conservation reasons, as the breeds were nearly lost.

And backyard hens are often spoiled pets. They get fed rich, hearty, varied diets. Usually a staple chow and then extras like leafy greens, bugs, fruits, veggies. Often they get table scraps. I’ve seen countless people make warm oatmeal on cold mornings to give to Their Ladies. They make them chicken sweaters, and aprons, and diapers so they can visit inside the house for snuggles. Enrichment is increasing for them every day. Most people allow their birds to free range during the day when it’s nice out. They give them names.

They also lay eggs, often infertile ones but even the fertile ones aren’t “babies” like you’re thinking. They are absolutely inert without incubation for over 24 hours straight because chickens lay a clutch of 8-15 eggs and need them to hatch at all the same time so they don’t start incubation until the hen stops laying and sits on them. Brooding is just as hard if not harder on them than laying is, because they stop eating and drinking except once a day, and hold in their poop so they only poop once a day instead of eliminating waste every 15 minutes or so like they would normally. This can cause them to lose a lot of weight and some birds will sit on eggs until it seriously threatens their health. So normally you don’t WANT them to brood if you can prevent it, unless you know they have fertile eggs AND you want babies or know how you’re going to re-home them. It’s also not possible to safely fix a bird; anesthesia is an extremely dangerous risk that often leads to death and no vet in their right mind would risk it just so you can prevent a chicken hen from laying eggs.

IN SUMMARY: The eggs they naturally produce by existing and being well cared for are edible, nutritious, and taste good, you cannot safely prevent them from laying them, and leaving the eggs in with them can lead to negative health consequences.

So what would you have someone do? Throw away food just because your pet produced it instead of the dirt? That’s illogical and wasteful.

Like, if you just don’t want to eat eggs, then don’t. I don’t particularly like eggs either! I keep chickens as pets, and they produce a bunch of eggs I don’t eat, so I sell them or give them to other people. BUT if you’re not eating eggs from backyard chickens because of some misguided idea that it’s cruel, you’re just wrong, and you should stop spreading that lie.