Editorial view
Twenty cents is a small price to pay for morality.
Twenty cents is a small price to pay for morality.
A spot check of local grocery stores indicates that you will pay between 20 cents and $1 more for a dozen eggs that are produced by free-range or uncaged chickens. It’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind in knowing you are not contributing to the conditions reported this week in The Sunday Pinnacle about the roughly 700 chickens rescued from a Gilroy factory egg farm.
As the executive director of the rescuing agency said in the article, the Gilroy operation is no worse nor better than any other factory egg farm operating across the country. Male chicks are suffocated or mulched alive in machines. Hens have their beaks cut off and up to a dozen are shoved into cages the size of an average file cabinet drawer.
There they are left to spend their lives being defecated on by the rows of cages above them, mostly in darkness. By the time they are past their prime egg-laying age, they are taken out and slaughtered and thrown away – they are too emaciated to be used as food.
This is not about vegetarianism, or vegan lifestyles or saving the whales; it’s about your religious sense, or spiritual sense, or lacking either of those, simply common sense. Because we have the power to inflict horrific living conditions onto lower members of the food chain doesn’t mean we should.
As the specie sitting atop the food chain, and the only one with a presumably advanced cognitive ability, we have a personal responsibility to manage that chain in a humane way. That is, after all, what being human should be about.
We are meat eaters, and in this case the eaters of unborn chicken embryos, yet we are the only animal on the planet that cares so little about the care of our food source. Native Americans, as well as indigenous people elsewhere, apologized and thanked the animal they had just killed. They applied moral values to the killing of food.
We throw them in garbage bags to suffocate because they are too old to lay eggs in volume.
Yet we have the power to change this practice – with our pocket books. The next time you’re in the grocery store, stop for a moment and listen to what your moral values are telling you. Hopefully what you hear will be worth at least 20 cents.
