See the horrors of battery cages
The push for UDS to carry cage-free eggs offers an opportunity to reassess relationships.

By Jason Ketola
The Minnesota Daily

. . . Rather than asking us to reason abstractly about how humans relate to chickens, Compassionate Action for Animals’ campaign to get UDS to carry eggs from certified humane companies asks us to look at the suffering of the hens and to reconsider whether chickens are as thinglike or machinelike as modern farms treat them.

Several resources are easily available to the public to help us evaluate how we think about egg-laying chickens even if we can’t all visit the farms themselves. This year, the group Compassionate Consumers produced a free, downloadable documentary available at www.wegmanscruelty.com , about its investigation of the farm supplying the East Coast grocery chain, Wegmans Food Market, with battery-caged eggs. The Twin Cities chapter of Compassionate Action for Animals discovered similar treatment of hens in their investigation of local farms, pictures of which are viewable at www.banbatterycages.org. The Humane Society of the United States has information, pictures and videos of battery-cage farming online at www.hsus.org/farm_animals.

For each of us, this is a profound opportunity to learn about where our eggs come from and to see the lives of hens in battery-cage conditions. Moreover, by acknowledging the suffering of these hens, we can reclaim a way of relating to animals that our culture has delegitimized.