Essays and Musings on Animals and Society

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Wegmans Lies As Disgusting As Their Egg Farm 

From The University of Rochester Vegetarian Education Group (UR-Veg):

Wegmans says: Happy hens are good business.

It doesn't make sense for us to harm the very animals that supply our eggs. (1)

False. This is a common (and seemingly common-sense) argument made by the egg industry. Happy chickens are more productive, so it would seem to be pointless to mistreat them.

Yet sadly, suffering can be profitable. Take cage density, for instance. It is well known that crowding causes suffering. As Wegmans-endorsed poultry expert J. A. Mench, Ph.D. writes:
There is a large body of evidence demonstrating that increasing density is associated with increased mortality and decreased hen housed egg production, both indications of reduced welfare… (5)
Yet Wegmans makes their hens suffer in crowded cages. Why do that if it means less eggs per hen?

The answer is in the numbers. Although crowded hens lay fewer eggs and die more frequently, the drop in per-hen production is outweighed by having more hens. Using figures cited by Mench: (15)
  • 3 hens crammed in a 2162 inch cage for a year (722 in./hen) produce 245 eggs each.
    3 hens x 245 eggs/hen = 735 eggs.

  • 4 hens crammed in a 2162 inch cage for a year (542 in./hen) produce 235 eggs each. 4 hens x 235 eggs/hen = 940 eggs.
In other words, more chickens per cage means more eggs and more profit — even though more suffering is involved.

So by giving hens even less room in their barren, God-forsaken, battery cage caverns, suffering goes up, profit goes up, revenue goes up, number of eggs sold goes up, but "productivity" per bird goes down.

Of course, 235 eggs a year is still a ridiculously unnatural number of eggs for a hen to lay in a year. Hens' natural ancestors — who can fly, roost in treetops, dust-bathe, walk freely, forage, clean their feathers with their beaks, raise their young, and build nests — lay maybe 20 eggs a year.

Women: suppose that through intensive breeding and added hormones you had not 12 menstrual cycles per year, but 120; a period every three days. Would you feel "productive?" It would be pure Hell. Your own body would become a hard-labor prison.


The entire article from which the UR-Veg excerpt is taken is extraordinarily well-written — highly recommended. It smashes Wegmans' preposterous claims about their egg farm to bits. The Wegmans egg operation is hideous, it's been exposed, and Wegmans, rather than showing some integrity, or the slightest concern for the animals whose role in the Wegmans business plan is to be miserable so the company can squeeze out a little more profit, has resorted to brazenly unsupportable cover-ups.

In a way, Wegmans is a mirror image of consumers who buy eggs produced by battery-caged hens but don't want to be reminded of the horrible suffering they know they are causing. Both sides make up lies — layers of weak, seat-of-the-pants, unconvincing lies to wish away cruelty, and to hide from sobering self-judgment.


Wegmans could save face and ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of hens if they would just come clean, and honestly admit that they confine these intelligent animals in deplorable, crammed conditions just to save money. I don't expect Wegmans to suddenly pull out of the egg business, but they could certainly give their hens some semblance of a life by backing off on some of the worst abuses. They could give the hens space to use their legs and wings; they could provide the hens with straw for nesting; they could hire one or two more people to identify dying hens and humanely euthanize them. Consumers — that might include you — could ease their minds and start to disengage themselves from cruelty and make reparations to the animals who have suffered so greatly by cutting back on eggs and by pledging to buy only eggs that came from cage-free hens.

Perhaps this is self-evident, but...Rather than sustain cruelty by lies and cover-ups, it is ultimately much easier to stop doing the cruel acts that force so much evasiveness. Fighting your conscience is draining, no matter how deftly you can spin out excuses for morally inexcusable behavior. In the end, we all want to do the right thing. Why wait?


References:

  1. From a form letter that Wegmans has been distributing to concerned customers.

  2. Developing Science-Based Animal Welfare Guidelines.Presented by J.A. Mench and J.C. Swanson at the 2000 Poultry Symposium and Egg Processing Workshop, UC Davis.

  3. "The effects of cage shape, housing and strain of chickens on various performance parameters (Report #2)." D. Bell and J. Carey, Progress in Poultry, vol. 37, 1998
Posted by: Gary / 5:40 PM
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