Milk and egg production still involve animals being killed for meat though e.g. female diary cows are killed for meat when they stop producing enough milk after a few years and males from diary cows are killed within a month of being born as veal.
- Male chickens are usually ground up alive within a day of being born because they're not economical to keep for meat. Locally kept chickens still feed into this supply and demand as the egg laying hens have to come from somewhere.
- Egg laying chickens can live for about 8 years but are usually killed after 2 years when they stop producing as many eggs. This happens at free range farms too.
- Also, free range doesn't mean what most people think it does e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range#Free-range_poultry "In the United States, the USDA free range regulations currently apply only to poultry and indicate that the animal has been allowed access to the outside.[3] The USDA regulations do not specify the quality or size of the outside range nor the duration of time an animal must have access to the outside.[4] ... Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means"
> since they lay eggs most days whether you eat them or not and if you don’t use them, they would rot or attract rodents.
We bred chickens to lay eggs that often though (wild chickens lay about 10 eggs a year whereas factory chickens lay about 300 which is so much it damages their health) and for them to leave their eggs unprotected (they've been bred to not "brood"). They're forced into this cycle.
That’s why I said local. I grew up in the country and lots of people had a few chickens. They run around freely and are not “farmed”. They’re almost pets. They lay eggs all the time, so there’s nothing wrong with eating those eggs.
As for where the hens come from, this is how my parents got hens when they kept chickens a long time ago: go to your neighbour with a rooster and say “hey, neighbour, could I get some chicks next time you have some? Thanks”
> Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States
I don’t live in the US though.
> We bred chickens to lay eggs that often
Ok, but now that they do, what are we to do? Slaughter all the non-farmed free range chickens to find some wild ones? The damage is done, what’s wrong with giving them good lives and enjoying their abandoned eggs?
- Do they let the chickens live until they die of natural causes? Or do they kill them before this?
If you have too many adult roosters running around, they act like assholes and start fighting, pecking eggs, and other nastiness, so you don't want to keep them.
Meat chickens are usually mixed sex, as they are bred to grow so quickly that you slaughter them after only two or three months.
Historically, people would castrate male chicks and raise them as capons for eating, but that's become rather niche.
I'm vegan, and on my honeymoon we went to a place where hens ran around free in the villages and would crawl underneath bushes to sleep for the night. Even I wouldn't see any ethical problems with humans grabbing unfertilized eggs they found under bushes each morning, but as I said, how many people would that feed?
It's the same as me having much less of a problem with hunting than I do factory farming, because a bullet and instant death, or at least within a couple of minutes, is a much better life for the animal than factory farming. But if we limited meat eating to only that being hunted, people would get to eat a small fraction of the meat they eat today.
Or rather, price would probably be so high that only the most well-off could afford the eggs and meat in that world. If you're in that group you might still get eggs and meat, otherwise not. Still, people who use these two examples as ethical ways of getting eggs and meat must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
Also, as of 2013, 98% of hens in the US was in cages, and 2% free-range:
https://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/5235021/Statistics-Laying-hens...
In the EU, it was 60% cage, 25% barn, 12% free-range, and 3% organic. At least for Sweden, free-range can still be indoors, but organic requires access to the outside. So even moving only to current free-range eggs would mean a drastic reduction of consumption.
> how many people would that feed?
Where I grew up, lots of people had a few hens running around and they typically gave their excess eggs away as there were too many. It wouldn’t take that much to sustain a small community on eggs.
But yes, you’re right, it wouldn’t replace the egg industry, my point is simply that if you do have access to such eggs, then I see no issues with eating them, even if you’re otherwise vegan.
> must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
I don’t disagree at all and certainly never said we can replace all farmed eggs with cruelty-free free-roaming-chicken eggs, just that if you do have access to those eggs, then as far as I’m concerned, enjoy some eggs.