Justifying eating eggs when the hens are not in a cage, a shed, or a slaughterhouse puts the focus on aesthetics, not ethics.
Egg consumption in a systemic context:
You cannot separate human consumption of eggs from the historical system that caused them to be used for food. The crux of the problem with the whole idea that chickens’ eggs can ever be ethically neutral as a foodstuff for humans is: domestication.
Modern domesticated hens lay about twenty times more eggs each year than their wild ancestors due to selective breeding, causing a number of physical consequences in both hens and roosters.
Selective breeding is a violation of bodily autonomy, as is the taking of eggs for personal benefit. Taking or giving away the fruit of someone else’s labor without consent for personal benefit when you don’t need it is not ethical, ever. Doing so when those hens cannot escape the toil and are very likely to suffer and die from it (and their brothers probably did die) is wrong. When a hen lays an egg, why do we feel we have a right to something her body has created?
Your gain is their pain:
Selective breeding and genetic manipulation via domestication have completely hijacked the bodies of chickens: the ramping up of sex hormones and the physical process of laying takes a devastating toll, causing many problems (egg yolk peritonitis, impacted egg material, cancer, osteoporosis, prolapses…). These will usually kill a hen before she stops laying on her own, far short of their full potential lifespan.
Roosters suffer not only by being killed as chicks or once they crow, but also due to jacked up sex hormones that take a toll on their bodies. Simply put, no matter where they came from, virtually every single hen had a brother who was killed for no good reason.
Egg consumption serves to maintain eggs as food in human society, and insures chickens will forever be put into situations of harm.
We understand that giving eggs from well-loved residents to humans may seem at first like a better option than if those humans bought eggs from farms. Our culture has largely conditioned us (vegan or not) to perceive animal farming in terms of how animals are treated. But as we’ve discussed, there’s no ethical way to consume hens’ eggs— egg consumption harms hens and roosters.
So what to do?
Preventative care to stop laying is the safest approach to keeping hens healthy and avoiding eggs all together. Otherwise, all eggs should be fed back to the hens in moderation, and we recommend that any excess be given to wildlife or other nonhuman residents who may need them, composted, or otherwise disposed of.
As MRC has most specifically expressed in our first, second, and third core principles, we take a strong stand against any use whatsoever of eggs from residents (along with any other residents’ “byproducts”).
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