I wrote a response to a remark way up there, just before the Cat crashed. I wanted to make the point: "An egg is not viable if it's not been fertilized. Unlike cows, chickens produce even if they have not been bred. If there is no rooster in the flock there are no fertile eggs. Just eggs."


Ethereal Purple, I agree that you have a right to eat or not eat whatever you choose. And perhaps in India, culture and husbandry affect your choices. In America, there are a great many variations. For instance, I grew up on a farm; much later I lived on a couple of acres I have in Oregon and there I raised my own chickens and rabbits and hog, not to mention a lush garden. So my viewpoint differs from yours.

Chickens that are free range, as mine were, have happy, busy lives. I didn't eat them (or the rabbits) but I did gather the eggs daily. The egg yolks of free ranging chickens are *very* different from the eggs one gets in the store. Fresh eggs have 'stand up' yolks and the whites mound up around the yolk; they look a great deal like poached eggs, although the yolks are orange, rather than pale. When I was young, we butchered and ate chickens routinely; it didn't seem to bother my mother to kill them, although one of my brothers and I used to hide away so we didn't have to see the process. On the other hand, once they were dead and chilled, I liked dissecting the meat of both chickens and pigs. Go figure.

Cows do *not* suffer from being milked and cows *do* give more milk when they are milked in addition to having a calf on them. Even women give more milk when it is needed for more than one child. It's a natural process.

Keep in mind that I'm talking about family farms- not the mega-industry that is calibrated to the nth degree of efficiency, and culling is practiced when that efficiency falls.

Yikes. I just deleted a couple of paragraphs on commercial chicken and calf raising that is just too depressing. Cat sakes. It's enough to make one vegetarian. But not vegan- to me, vegan is the equivalent of a religious teaching that condemns contraception. I can see why abortion is controversial. Intervening with the fertilization process, on the other hand, imo does not constitute doing harm to a human being.