where does the loathing come from?????

[CHICKEN little 1]

To be honest i'd rather pay a small backyard farmer a little more for their eggs than buy the big production store eggs. Big difference in quality.

Put a store egg,and a farm egg in the pan next to each other and tell me which one you'd rather eat.

Better yet ever see a pic of production hens in their little cages.Look healthy to you????????
I support my local farmers and growers in the area.Sorry I'll buy from them first!

 

[fopzuu]

Hers's what I want to know ....Since when did the lack of intelligence become a measure for whether or not something deserves humane treatment? -I mean, I still love my DH.

 

[L&Schickens]

"We even put timers on the lights in the hen house to turn them on early so the hens would think it is daylight and begin the laying process — further evidence of the hen’s stupidity. "

As if the hens have any control over when they lay an egg.

produces "Would you look at the time. Guess I better start laying an egg!"

 

[panner123]

I look at the way the chickens are kept by the big egg producers today and shake my head in disbelief. I grew up with my grand father having egg producers, he never kept them caged that way. In the late forties he let me collect eggs which he sold for me. I was able to buy my first fishing pole with that money. When I got out of the Navy, I bought a chicken farm. It had five large houses on it, one of which was two story. Each one was 75' x200', so there was just a couple of chickens. Every chicken had access to the 28 acres of runs. Never was any more than two chickens on one nest. When that happened it was of their chosing, not because I put them together. Yes, I had the houses lighted so there was 16 hours of light each day. This did keep prodution up. When I noticed a hen was not laying every day, it became dinner. If not mine a friends. If I was to own an egg producing farm today, I could not put 6 or 7 hens in one small cage. I believe if the eggs produced as mine were, you couldn't tell them from your back yard chickens. Both my grand fathers and my eggs were sold at the local farmers market and many of the local stores. We also had an egg route similar to the old milk route. Any eggs more than two days old were given to the local churches, for those that couldn't afford to buy them. They is the way it should be today, but it isn't. Today you are lucky to get an egg in the large stores that is less than two months old. That is the reason for the difference in the taste, not because of overcrowding.

 

[chickmamawannabe]

There's a thing called progress. Sometimes we all have to sacrifice for the greater good. For example, Wal-Mart is able to sell clothing so cheaply because the clothes are produced in mainly third world countries by women that make all of 50 cents a week, therefore, I don't buy clothes from Wal-Mart. I can't have chickens right now, so I try and do the next best thing and buy cage free vegetarian fed eggs from the supermarket. Yes, they cost more, but really not that much more than other eggs. I don''t think that passing this proposition would completely sink the egg industry. There are obviously several large egg producers that are managing just fine without having to stuff six or seven hens in a tiny cage. I think that if the majority of people who buy eggs could see first hand the conditions of battery caged hens, many more people would buy cage free.

 

[Reinbeau]

Quote:
Huh? Whose greater good? Concentrating profit into one pocket is only good for that one pocket. I'm all for free enterprise, but what's going on out there now is unbridled greed. That's what's got us to the financial position we're in right now on a national scale. This isn't progress, it's economic disaster on a global scale.

Sorry, the news is on behind be scaring the bejeebers outta me. My point is making money by cheating (which is what I think of cramming 'stupid' chickens together, among many other factory farm type practices, in the greater business world, it's accounting shenanigans) isn't good financial sense. Well grown chickens and eggs (and sound financial practices) benefit all.

 

[DuckLady]

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[flakey chick]

Quote:
Funny that you should bring that up. The cage-free thing sounds better than battery cages, but to me feeding chickens a vegetarian diet sounds cold. Give those girls some nice juicy bugs!

 

[Oblio13]

Quote:
"Cage free" means that they were raised crammed together on the floor in a gigantic building. They don't have any more space, fresh air or sunshine than battery hens. It's just a marketing gimmick.

And chickens aren't naturally vegetarians. Again, that's just a marketing appeal to a demographic that's so removed from reality that they think it's somehow wrong for meat-eaters to eat meat.

 

[Rhett&SarahsMom]

back in the late 80s I went to an agricultural high school.
We had a production flock of egg layers, that when they stopped laying went on to become part of the school lunch. We also had a herd of beef "cows", a dairy herd, pigs and sheep. All were raised on school property with "limited" technology.

We did not debeak the chickens. The chickens were not stuffed into cages with 3 or four other birds. We gathered the eggs from the chicken that were kept two to a cage. We also gathered the eggs from the hens that were kept "free" in one of the other poultry barns.
Come time "we" processed the chickens. We also did the castration of the piglets etc. The bull calves that were born went on to become veal.. but were not kept the way some larger veal producers keep them.

To say that the cost of eggs will skyrocket to 20 some odd dollars per dozen, if this proposition is passed is absurd. Smaller, more local farms and producers WILL pop up. People will find other ways to get eggs.. or produce or what ever they need. Will it be "painful"? Probably. But maybe what is needed is the weeding out of the weak in this country.