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Egg Prices Are Soaring. Are Backyard Chickens the Answer?
(civileats.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Or you could go vegan and stop abusing other animals.
no one is abusing animals
exploitation is abuse. People are seeing these chickens as only a means to make eggs, instead of the individuals that they are.
I disagree that exploitation is abuse
My mom and her husband have a handful of chickens in their garden. They have a large, fenced off area surrounding the garden where they can move about freely, a well kept and insulated shed for the nights and they get fed with quality feed and often some treats and tablescraps they enjoy (they just love spaghetti for example). The chickens have names, adore their humans and are more like pets than livestock.
How is that animal abuse?
Modern chickens were bred so that they produce so many eggs that they literally drain their bodies of calcium. It wears their bodies down. Seeing them as someone to be exploited and only as a means to produce eggs is what is abusive.
In order to keep them healthy, you have to give them either an implant that stops them from producing eggs or feed the eggs back to them so that they recover the calcium.
Plus, what happens when they get old and stop producing eggs? Then what do you do? Do you just keep them around? Or do you kill them and then eat them? Doing that would also be abusive.
most people don't see chickens as people, so this isn't a concern. they're animals, not someones
You're an animal too.
And yes, they are someones. They are sentient. Each individual has personality. Whether people acknowledge that or not does not make it not true.
I'm a person. humans are animals, that is true, but we are distinct in important ways. denying this is dehumanizing.
No, that is a speciesist take. We are not distinct in the ways that are most important. Among many similarities non-human animals feel pain and don't want to die. Those are the most important ways that we are the same.
Do you think humans evolved in a vacuum? We share a lot of similarities in our brains with other types of animals that also have brains.
It is not dehumanizing. Here's a quote to think on: "When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"
i'm not equal with animals. this is just more dehumanization.
speciesism is rational. i wouldn't ask an elephant to engage in a discussion on lemmy.
Speciesism is not rational. I'm assuming you would not apply the same standards to a human that had the same intelligence as a chicken?
Say we had a person with the same intelligence of a chicken. Would it be okay to milk them and use them for their milk? Or to use any part of them for ourselves? To eat them?
we don't know that any non-human animal understands personal mortality, so we need to clear up an ambiguity in your syntax there. the don't even know if they know they colud die. if you don't know you could want something, to say that you don't want it is almost tautological. we can't say teher is any evidence they want not to die, though.
There is evidence. Watch them scream as they die in any documentary. Watch them try to run away as they get corralled into the death cage.
https://watchdominion.org/
that's not evidence of understanding personal mortality.
Yes it is.
it's not enough evidence. we still need proof they understand personal mortality.
It's more than enough. You go there in person and try and kill one of those cows or chickens and watch them run away and then you tell me straight to my fucking face that they Don't have a desire to live/ not die.
this, too, is not proof. do you have any animal cognition papers that show cows understand that they might die?
you are using an expansive definition of "someone" that most people don't recognize and most disagree with.
Most people thought slavery was okay at a certain point in time... Just because most people think something doesn't make it right.
comparing slaves to animals is what slavers do.
You're an animal too.
I'm a person. humans are animals, that is true, but we are distinct in important ways. denying this is dehumanizing.
We are the same in important ways too, denying this is just a cope.
one of the important ways we are the same is our comparable physiology that allows us to have a symbiotic relationship in which we provided them with food and protection and the ability to reproduce, while gleaning for ourselves nutrients.
Our comparable physiology also triggers our empathetic instincts, which allows us to understand their emotions in a basic way.
And when we kill them, it hurts us.
Have you ever killed an animal? It feels bad.
this sounds like anthropomorphism
Yeah, we anthropomorphize anything with a face. It's a natural human pack instinct. Obviously chickens don't have the same emotions as humans so we can't understand them perfectly, but we can tell when they're afraid or aggressive or nice.
And when we kill them it feels bad. There's a reason people who work in slaughterhouses have higher rates of depression, insomnia, anxiety substance abuse, and even suicide.
I don't know how we could prove this one way or another.
Proving it would require a much deeper understanding of the brain, I think. I'd be very surprised if they had all the same emotions, since they have such different instincts and behaviors and social structures.
It's also irrelevant to my point.
Whatever emotions they feel, it's enough for us to empathize with them. That means it hurts us to hurt them. You can feel it yourself if you've ever killed or hurt an animal.
surely you can see that what you are constructing is purely an appeal to emotion, and there is not empirical means to test anything you're saying.
There's empirical evidence that slaughterhouse workers experience deep psychological harm and that's all I need. It clearly hurts us to hurt animals.
I'm not saying chickens deserve to live because they have emotions, just to be clear. I'm saying that their emotions are enough to trigger our empathy, and that means every time you kill an animal you're causing yourself psychological distress.
you kind of making a leap of logic though. there may be other explanations for why slaughterhouse workers experience psychological distress. it could be socioeconomic. it may be some other conditioning. your explanation amounts to post hoc ergo propter hoc
We can eliminate other explanations by looking at workers in similar socioeconomic circumstances that perform similar work.
Based on pay, they make about as much as other packing, manufacturing, and warehouse workers. It's indoor bluecollar work. Yet they experience far more psychological distress than other workers.
Here's another data point: when a new slaughterhouse opens in a community, rates of violence and crime rates go up. The same doesn't happen when a new manufacturing plant, packaging plant, or warehouse opens.
It seems trivially obvious. 🤷♀️
you aren't controlling for every possible alternative. for instance, a less media saturated culture with fewer depictions of anthropomorphism might not have this issue. you're simply choosing to believe it's an inherent problem with the process.
🙄
that's a strawman. i'm raising one possible explanation that you hadn't even considered (much less explored), and there are likely an infinite number of them.
Are you a fucking Psychopath? Do you not understand that people would get affected by murdering others every day, day after day? Seeing that shit affects people. Maybe not you, clearly.
They do exactly that, they mix the crushed up eggshells under the chicken feed to help them recuperate. As for when they get old, they keep them until they die naturally, though they have also given some older chickens to an animal sanctuary/petting zoo thing in the region before.
I certainly abhor industrial scale animal abuse as is practiced, but as a life long vegetarian myself who is used to more harmonious animal husbandry I also believe there is an ethical way of keeping animals as livestock (and benefiting from their produce).
Are they eating their eggs? That would be the only problem I could see with that situation. seeing them as something to be exploited for what they make, rather than as individuals.
Whenever I wonder if something is abusive, I just compare it to what it would be like if they were a human. If there was a human woman in your care with the same intelligence of a chicken, you wouldn't think it was okay to milk them and drink their milk. That would be fucking weird.