All about prison eggs

Why call them prison eggs? Because that’s exactly what they are.
 
Eggs produced by battery hens are the product of living, feeling, sentient creatures sentenced to spend every minute of their miserable and unnaturally short lives in a prison made of steel bars.
 
And it’s not just any prison.
 
Imagine a cell that’s not even wide enough for you to stretch your arms, surrounded by rusty and filthy mesh on all four sides. With a roof of bars that’s barely high enough for you to stand up straight, and a cruel floor of rusty wire that digs into your feet so that you never have a comfortable moment in your life.
 
Ever.
 
Now picture that same prison cell with so many people squashed so tightly together that you can never move freely, turn around or stretch your arms. Imagine having to crawl over your cell-mates every time that you want to move, or eat or drink, and never being able to avoid the holes between the bars.
 
Perhaps you're imagining something that looks a bit like this?

Now imagine getting your leg stuck in one of those holes, with no one to help or to pull you out. Unable to get to food and water while you slowly starve to death. With absolutely nowhere to go if you don’t like your cell-mates, and nowhere to run if one of them decides to hurt you - and because there’s absolutely nothing to do, sooner or later a fight is going to break out.
 
Imagine your entire life languishing inside this little box of rusty wire, never seeing the sun or feeling anything but the painful bite of bars beneath your feet. Imagine the osteoporosis produced by endless egg production and lack of exercise, leading to the pain of brittle and broken bones. With absolutely no hope of medical treatment, and you just have to bear the pain because you can still lay eggs.
 

Imagine being surrounded by row after row of identical cells as far as the eye can see, each one stacked full of helpless prisoners making endless noise and voiding their waste on the floor below, the acrid stench and ammonia building up until it burns your eyes.
 
Imagine spending every minute of every day of your entire miserable life like this.

It's not a pretty picture, is it?
 
In fact, it’s such an ugly picture that you might be feeling a bit uncomfortable if you’ve followed us this far, or even a little bit sick. You might even be feeling a bit angry that you’ve been forced to think about such unpleasantness, and perhaps you’re tempted to leave the site immediately, never to return?
 
But it’s a true picture of the life of a typical battery hen. And if the truth is so uncomfortable that most of us cannot bear to think about it for more than a few seconds, then how must it feel like for the millions of battery hens who are forced to experience this outrageous cruelty for their entire lives?

Back to top