Your Positions

• We should all be vegetarian. Animals should never be killed or mistreated, but it is OK to use them for milk and eggs, because it can done without harming them. (Start over)

• My uncle (or actually my friends’ cousins uncle who my friend met one time) has a farm and he doesn’t kill the chickens and they are free to roam around in the lush countryside. (Go back)

Things to Consider

First of all, I don’t believe you. So many times when people say this, they turn out to be lying or wrong: “Oh actually I guess my uncle does slaughter the chickens and eats them, but it’s only rarely”. But let’s suppose what you say is correct, and assume the best case scenario: your uncle treats chose chickens like family, he lets them live out the rest of their natural lives even after their egg production stops, he takes care of them when they are sick, they are free to run around a lush field.

There is still the question: where did he get those chickens? The answer is almost surely going to be: from a chicken agriculture business. How did those chickens come to be? Well, first of all, they were selectively bred. If it looks like what you would stereotypically think of as a chicken, it has been selectively bred. The red jungle fowl, a wild ancestor of domestic egg-laying chickens, produces around 12 eggs a year (as humans do). A domestic egg-laying chicken produces around 300 eggs a year. This places severe strain on their bodies. The calcium for the eggs shells comes from their bones, and domestic egg-laying chickens often face severe calcium deficiencies as a result, leading to an incredibly high incidence of broken bones (as high as 40%).

There are similar health concerns with domestic chickens as there are for pure bred dogs which have been selectively bred for their utility to humans, rather than for their own welfare. As it currently stands, it is unethical to breed more of these chickens into existence, because their quality of life is quite low as a result of their genetic impairments. To be frank, this breed of chickens should never have existed in the first place, just as French bulldogs (who have serious respiratory issues as a result of selective breeding to look “cute”). The best thing we can do is stop breeding them, and one way to achieve this is to stop buying from breeders, just as we should stop buying from puppy mills. We should care for the ones who are still alive as best we can, but to contribute to the continual breeding of these animals is irresponsible.

It is recommended that rescued chicken be allowed to eat their own eggs (which they happily do on their own) to replenish the massive nutrient deficiencies they otherwise face. Chickens also like to have a clutch. If you take eggs away, the chicken may end up laying more to compensate, putting further strain on their body. Chickens are quite intelligent animals, and they have many maternal instincts, and they notice when eggs go missing. Recent research has shown that chickens have complex social structures, and an intricate form of communication. They are not the stupid egg-machines people would have you believe. Many of the behaviors people point to in chickens to show they are “stupid” are behaviors which people are too stupid to understand. Many people point to “Mike the Headless Chicken” (a chicken who head was cut off, except for their brain stem, but was able still to walk around) as evidence that chickens are stupid: they can still do all their chicken stuff without their head! But if you think about it, this is the exact opposite conclusion you should be making. It tells you that even with 95% of a chickens brains totally removed, they can still appear to us as though they are doing all the normal things chickens do. But nature doesn’t waste brain resources (it is heavily selected against because the high energy cost of supporting a brain). That other 95% is doing things that we as humans don’t understand, responsible for behaviors that are invisible to us because we are not chickens and don’t understand the things that are important to a chicken mind. Judging a chicken as stupid by their superficial gait or head movements is about as stupid as judging a person to be stupid because they have cerebral palsy and can’t speak and move like a “normal intelligent person”. People in fact do make such superficial judgments all the time, and it has been a great tragedy of humanity how poorly people with disabilities have been treated throughout history because of people’s inability to understand basic facts about the limits of their own knowledge. And of course, if aliens were to look down at us for most of our everyday lives, we’d look pretty stupid too most of the time, bumping into objects while on our phones, wandering around aimlessly in the grocery store. We’d hope they’d be more judicious with us before deciding to enslave us than we have been with others.

But putting all of this aside, let’s be real, you don’t get all of your eggs from that uncle. You buy eggs from the grocery store or a farmers’ market like 99.9% of people, you filthy cheese-mouth. Don’t pretend like you can excuse that because you sometimes get eggs from your uncle too. That’s kind of like rambling on about all the times you didn’t get in a fight after drinking, when people are trying to tell you to cut down on drinking.