General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should Factory Farming Be Banned? [View all]LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)A laying hen is a good example of this: a jungle fowl lays about an egg a month. A laying hen bred from those jungle fowl lays one a day and is killed after a year or two when that production slacks off slightly, to be replaced by another hen who turns feed into eggs slightly more efficiently. Her natural lifespan is of course much, much longer than this.
In that year or so she's a sick, malnourished creature, because her body has been bred to prioritize making eggs at 30x the natural rate over making her a healthy chicken.
There is no way to make that not cruel, because the point of it is to produce not a healthy chicken but a biological machine that converts (generally dubious) food inputs into eggs at maximum efficiency.
If somebody bred a chicken tomorrow that laid three eggs a day, was spectacularly deformed because of the mineral loss and died of malnutrition at six months, every big egg farm would switch to that breed immediately. Because capitalism. Their investors could sue them if they didn't, because they'd be shirking their legal responsibility to maximize profits.
edit: I neglected to mention that this is only true if the layer breed chicken is female. If it's male he goes straight out of his egg and into a trash bin or grinder, often to be fed to his growing sisters. He's not a potential egg machine (and not an efficient enough converter of food into flesh to be used for the production of meat: that's what "broiler" breeds are for) so he's literally garbage. And again that's just as true in cage free/organic/pastured/humane certified/blah blah operations.