Cage-free Eggs Are Out

If yous've ever bought eggs in a supermarket, you've probably faced this conundrum: do I purchase the regular, cheap eggs, or the nicer, organic/cage-free eggs? And supposing you want to leap for the humane stuff, how do you know which farms are actually treating their hens right, and which are but throwing upwardly smoke and mirrors?

The short answer: yes, you should be buying muzzle-complimentary eggs. Only the case for ownership organic or free-range eggs isn't very compelling. When shopping around, be sure to look for "Certified Humane" and, even better, "Animal Welfare Canonical" stickers on your eggs. They're your best bet if yous love egg products but want to be sure the hens laying them are beingness treated well.

Why cage-costless matters

Most eggs are produced in a way that severely hurts chickens. About 97 percent of egg-laying hens in the U.s. are bars to what are known equally "bombardment cages," holding 5 to x birds each, with United Egg Producers' minimum standards mandating 67 square inches per bird — a smaller infinite than a standard eight.5-past-11-inch piece of paper (UEP estimates that about xv percent of hens are raised past farmers that don't even meet those standards).

These spaces severely disrupt the laying procedure, causing huge pain to birds. "The worst torture to which a bombardment hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act," the Nobel laureate ethologist Konrad Lorenz in one case said. "For the person who knows something about animals it is truly middle-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow cagemates to search there in vain for cover."

There are three broad alternatives to traditional cages: barn systems, aviary systems, and "enriched cages." The following analogy from the book Compassion by the Pound past researchers F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk shows how the four options compare:

Alternative confinement systems for chickens.

Norwood and Luck; made horizontal by Vox

In befouled systems, a large flock gets an unabridged befouled inside which to roam freely, with food and water provided at various locations, perches available, sawdust for scratching, and nests for hen to lay in, usually with a mantle to provide privacy for the hen. Norwood and Lusk estimate that the typical barn provides 200 square inches per bird, nearly triple the corporeality given to battery caged hens.

Aviaries are like barns, but with multiple floors at different heights that birds tin wing or walk upward to. That might give the birds more space, depending on the flooring space allotted, and it makes information technology easier for them to run abroad from bullies in the flock. Both aviaries and barns tin provide admission to the outdoors, making them "gratis range" systems. In the enriched cage system, birds are still in cages simply get "more infinite, a pocket-size perch, a pan for dust bathing, and a individual nest for egg laying."

At that place are some disadvantages to the barn/aviary cage-free arroyo. Near significantly, mortality is significantly higher: Norwood and Lusk estimate that the mortality rate in muzzle systems is iii percent, while it's 7 percent for cage-free, ix per centum for gratis-range, and 13 pct for organic. At first glance, that'south a bespeak in favor of an enriched cage approach, not a cage-free approach.

Information technology'south not articulate how much of this is due to differences in confinement conditions, and how much is just due to differences in the type of chicken existence raised in each environment. Brown hens tend to work improve in cage-costless environments, whereas white hens are preferred by cage-egg producers, for example, and experiments take establish that when raised in identical environments, brown hens have higher mortality rates anyhow.

Just in practice, what's causing the deaths doesn't actually matter. Buying more than muzzle-free eggs these days means bringing into existence more brownish hens with shorter lives and fewer white hens with longer lives; yous have to weigh that confronting the higher quality of life the brown hens get while they exist.

Luckily, in that location are relatively rigorous means to weigh those factors. 1 is FOWEL, a mathematical model used to estimate the welfare of laying hens under various conditions on a scale of 0 to 10, 10 existence the best. Norwood and Lusk report that FOWEL gives the typical cage arrangement a 0.0, enriched cages ii.3, aviaries 5.8, barns 5.9, and barns with free-range provisions half dozen.3.

And so muzzle-free is better than caged. And this matters non just at a macro level, but when it comes to individuals' spending decisions near eggs. The level of egg production — and thus the number of hens who suffer through this — is highly responsive to changes in consumer spending: 0.91 fewer eggs are produced for every egg not consumed, per Norwood and Lusk, as farms nascency fewer hens into these awful conditions. Put another way, each caged egg you lot don't eat prevents most a day of craven suffering by helping reduce the number of chickens who are raised for this kind of treatment.

What about organics and gratuitous-range eggs?

The dark-brown hen/white hen divide isn't the just thing accounting for differences in mortality rates, though. Gratuitous-range birds and organic birds confront even college death rates than non-free-range cage-free birds, and those differences probably are a consequence of differences in how the animals are treated. Free-range birds are at very real risk of predation, which leads to them registering similar stress levels as caged birds. They also face a greater danger from parasites.

This can be overcome to some degree through predator protection measures like tall wire fencing, just merely knowing that eggs are "free range" doesn't tell y'all that the hens had that kind of prophylactic. "The desirability of any free range system depends crucially on predator protection and the indoor housing facilities provided," Norwood and Lusk conclude. They argue for considering costless range an "optional component" of cage-costless product.

In other words: don't go actively looking for complimentary-range eggs. Cage-free lonely is good, and in some cases even meliorate than gratis range.

Producers of organic eggs in the US have to provide some outdoor access, raising similar concerns equally non-organic free-range eggs; they must be cage-costless also. Only organic producers also aren't allowed to provide synthetic amino acids to chickens (even though those acids significantly meliorate chickens' nutrition and overall health), and are restricted in their usage of antibiotics.

"A farmer cannot treat a sick animal with antibiotics and so sell the beast for organic food," Norwood and Lusk write. "This causes some farmers to deny antibiotics to ill animals. Every bit a outcome, hens suffer. A number of animal scientists in the US believe organic production is fell to hens for this reason."

Add together in the fact that organic eggs aren't whatsoever better for you — just like most organic foods — and you have a pretty practiced example for preferring non-organic cage-free eggs to organic ones. Organic'due south still amend than caged eggs, to be sure, but the policies toward antibiotics and amino acids are savage.

What stickers should I be looking for?

The most rigorous animal welfare certification program when it comes to eggs is Animate being Welfare Canonical. Their logo is a white sun with bluish rays over a green pasture:

This is the one to aim for!

Animal Welfare Approved

Every bit the Humane Lodge of the Usa explains, AWA has the highest standards of any private animal welfare auditing plan for eggs. It prohibits producers from beak cutting, in which farmers remove part of newborn hens' beaks to forestall pecking, and from starving birds to force them to molt, some other unfortunately common practice. But AWA-approved eggs tin can exist hard to come by. There aren't whatsoever stores selling AWA eggs inside a 15 mile radius of Washington, DC, for example.

A 2nd-best option is Certified Humane, which bans forced molting but not beak cutting. Both AWA and Certified Humane free range crave outdoor access, for better or worse (Certified Humane has different levels of certification; the basic level doesn't crave outdoor access). Certified Humane is a lot easier to detect in the grocery store, with brands similar Nellie'due south and Open Nature making the cut. The logo is pretty piece of cake to spot:

A Certified Humane carton of eggs at a Safeway in Washington, DC.

Vox / Dylan Matthews

"American Humane Certified" and "Nutrient Alliance Certified" offer like protections as Certified Humane. "United Egg Producers Certified" is a much weaker certification; it bans forced molting but allows for hens to exist kept in cages. "Pasture-raised" means much the aforementioned affair as "free range" labels. And a lot of common labels tell you nothing at all well-nigh chicken treatment: vegetarian-fed, natural, farm fresh, fertile, omega-three enriched, pasteurized, etc.

Why ethically raised eggs might not be adept enough

That said, many animal advocates would urge consumers to not just buy better eggs only to reduce egg consumption in full general. I reason is that a lot of the eggs we eat don't take the course of eggs we buy in cartons, but come in mayonnaise, salad dressings, frozen foods, eatery meals, and other contexts where it'south hard to judge where the eggs came from, and what weather condition the hens were raised in.

More than importantly, though, most hatcheries that supply hens to farms — even cage-costless or gratuitous-range farms — use a practice called "chick culling," in which male chicks are slaughtered en masse, usually past grinding them live:

Gassing is also sometimes used. This is non an inevitability of egg product. The use of dual-purpose breeds of chicken, where the males could be (humanely) raised for meat rather than killed immediately, eliminates the demand for culling; and so does identifying chick gender inside the egg, which new technological developments have made possible. 2 years ago, United Egg Producers committed to eliminating culling past the year 2020 using in-ovo sex detection. Merely until so, alternative is still a reality of American egg production, i to which people eating eggs today are contributing.

Muzzle-free eggs are definitely ameliorate. There'southward no uncertainty about that. Merely eating fewer eggs altogether is amend notwithstanding.

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Correction: An before version of this article said that all Certified Humane certifications require outdoor access; only some exercise.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/12/25/10662742/egg-labels-cage-free

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