Egg shortage? Good. Here’s why I hope it continues

Meat eaters often think that vegans like me look down on them. The truth is that no one looks down on meat eaters more than meat, egg and dairy bosses

Shoppers are finding empty shelves on the egg aisles, as egg rationing becomes the latest reality of these weird times we live in.

Supermarket chains including Tesco, Aldi, Lidl, Asda, Ocado and Marks & Spencer are limiting how many boxes of eggs each customer can buy. Eggs, the staple of so many weekly shops and an ingredient in a million recipes, are suddenly a rarity on the shelves. What has gone wrong?

Supermarkets blame the shortage on an outbreak of avian flu, but farmers point the finger at surging production costs and lack of support from retailers, which have left them losing money. There are forecasts that egg rationing could continue into next spring.

So supermarkets are blaming the farmers, and farmers are blaming the supermarkets. Someone has to back down and I think it should be us, the consumers, because once you realise how cruel egg farming is, you will surely never want to buy another egg again.

The horror show of egg farming begins as soon as the chicks are hatched. Male chicks are financially worthless to farmers, so they are killed within hours of their birth. Around 40 million day-old male chicks are killed in the UK each year by gassing. Sometimes they are even ground up alive, or dumped in a bin bag and left to suffocate.

The female chicks are kept for laying, but only after they have faced a brutal awakening. The babies are placed into a machine that painfully burns their beaks off without anaesthetic to stop them pecking at the other hens in the cramped surroundings they will spend their short lives in.

Egg packaging and marketing often portrays scenes of pastoral bliss, with happy hens roaming free. The companies will slap the free range label on some packs to reassure you even more. Unfortunately, with the UK producing as many as 11.3 billion eggs per year, hens are obviously kept in horrendously cramped conditions.

Stinking, free range sheds are allowed to squeeze nine birds per square metre, which has been compared to 14 people living in a one-bedroom flat. Some so-called free range sheds in the UK have an astonishing 16,000 hens crammed into tier after tier of cramped shelves. Is that what you had in your head when you saw the words “free range”?

Although supposedly free range hens theoretically have access to the outdoors, this is through a small “pop hole” and the minimum requirement is one pop hole per 800 birds, meaning many hens never get to leave the shed.

It isn’t just the claustrophobia of the sheds that is awful. Hens living naturally in the wild lay as few as 20 eggs per year, but modern farms use excessive protein feed and near-constant lighting to push the hens to lay up to 500 eggs annually.

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After 72 torturous weeks, the hens’ bodies are absolutely exhausted and they are sent to the slaughterhouse, having lived less than one-tenth of their natural lifespan. Many of these abused mothers are killed in gas chambers.

If you buy eggs, you are supporting all this cruelty – whether you mean to or not. The only reason these farms exist is because you bankroll them every time you put a pack of eggs on the supermarket checkout. It is your money that kills those male chicks on the day of their birth and forces those de-beaked hens into cramped sheds.

Having noticed how misled you’ve been by egg marketing, wait until you hear the horrors dairy and meat companies are hiding from you with their ads and packaging.

Meat eaters often think that vegans like me look down on them. The truth is that no one looks down on meat eaters more than meat, egg and dairy bosses, who can’t believe their luck that shoppers who claim to be against animal cruelty continue to buy the carcasses, eggs and milk of animals who knew nothing but cruelty during their short, sad lives.