Don’t let the routine confuse you:

• Imprisoning someone in a crammed cage in the size of three-quarters of an A4 sheet - is wrong
• Suffocating a day old chick with carbon monoxide because he is not profitable - is wrong
• Tossing a day old chick into a trash can because he is not profitable - is wrong
• Depriving maternal care from a baby - is wrong
• Restricting someone’s motion for all her life - is wrong
• Never letting a bird stretch her wings - is wrong
• Forcing someone to stand on a wire cage - is wrong
• Depriving a chicken from perching, foraging, dust-bathing and nesting - is wrong
• Transforming a chicken into an egg laying machine, who lays 15 times more eggs than she would lay naturally - is wrong
• Depriving food and water - is wrong
• Debeaking is a painful injury deliberately inflicted by humans in an attempt to “adapt the bird” to intensive systems, and it’s wrong
• Inflicting osteoporosis is wrong
  Causing it for a few more cents is devilish!

Think that all this was a daily routine for every one in six humans in the world.
Well, it is the reality of more than a billion chickens every year.

Due to modern humanity's obsession with profits, a cruel oppressive and destructive system for managing farm animals has been created, and this system takes its toll on every aspect of animals’ lives.

Immense, frightening, smelling of death and disease, these barns sit on vast stretches of land, countless rows of giant metal structures protruding into the sky. From a distance, you can get an eerie sense of the overwhelming number of birds who live day after day, minute after minute, inside the long windowless sheds. But the hens are invisible, there is no big sign proudly announcing that this enormous factory, stinking for miles and spilling forth a lake of manure, is where eggs come from.

Eggs are laid by chickens kept in filth, frustration, misery and pain. Due to the uncontrolled human growth, things will only get worse.

The industrialization of the chickens began before they were even born by artificial insemination, which is a gentle way to call a rape.
Before the artificial insemination process starts, the farmer restrains the male bird and forcibly obtains semen by squeezing the bird's genitals. In many cases, this procedure causes bleeding as a result of injuries to the gutter tissue or the genitals. Next, the female is held down while the inseminator presses strongly on her stomach and back to accentuate her vagina. Then he inserts a tube into her bulged vagina with a circulatory movement. The tube is attached to a syringe containing the semen. This is how chicks come into the world.

The chicks are born in incubators inside a hatchery where the female chicks are vaccinated against contagious diseases, by automated mechanical injectors.
A single hatchery can incubate 70,000 to 110,000 eggs at once.
About 2,500-3,500 chicks every day per worker.

They are reared intensively from birth and when reaching sexual maturity at the age of 18 weeks, they are sent to battery farms where they are crammed into cages, stacked in tiers.

Since laying hens are bred to be lean, to eat little and lay a lot, the males which are too skinny for meat and unable to lay, are not profitable – therefore unwanted.
These one day old chicks are tossed alive into a grinding machine, or being suffocated with carbon monoxide, or tossed alive into rubbish bins along with everyday trash to suffocate as other bodies pile on top of them while the bag is sealed.
The upper layers starve to death, or die of cold.
That is the fate of one billion chicks a year.

32 EVERY SECOND.

The battery hen spends all her laying life in a cage, crammed in with three and up to ten other birds. She is sentenced to life, in a space equivalent of less than three-quarters of a standard A4 sheet.
Their bodies are so tightly compressed that when a single hen attempts to move, the entire population of the cage feels the pressure and responds with an outburst of shrill cries. They cannot find a single normal body posture during their whole life. Try to imagine the frustration, the boredom and the anger that this system creates. The hens are crowded so tightly, that they cannot even stretch their wings or legs and they cannot fulfill basic behavioral patterns or social needs.
Constantly rubbing against the wire cages, they suffer from severe feather loss and their bodies are covered with bruises and abrasions.

They are caged in this hideous prison, every minute of every day throughout their entire lives. The only way out is to the slaughterhouse.

The egg industry is almost completely automated. Feeding, lighting, temperature, and even moulting are controlled by machines. The eggs are rolled to a conveyor belt, which carries them out of the cage. Conveyor belts also deliver food and water to the cages, which are stacked in several tiers.

Dim electric lights are kept on for 16 or 17 hours a day, artificially stimulating the hens' biological rhythms of reproduction. During 'lights on' in a battery cage facility, the atmosphere is one of intense distress. The automatic feeders are operated too. This forces hens to battle for a spot at the front of their tiny, overcrowded cage. Those who are too weak to move towards the feeding tray lie silently on the wire floor, trampled by their cage mates, slowly starving to death.

The air is dense with the screams of thousands of birds who suffer extreme physical pain and mental distress.

Battery hens live in a poisoned atmosphere. Toxic ammonia rises from the decomposing uric acid in the manure pits, beneath the cages. This causes ammonia-burned eyes and chronic respiratory disease to millions of hens.

The feet and legs of chickens, are suited for an outdoor life of scratching the ground in search for food, contain complex joints full of tiny bones, tendons, muscles and ligaments. However, battery cage hens never stand on anything but a wire cage floor.
The wire floors of battery cages, coupled with the fact that the hens are unable to properly exercise their legs and scratch, results in painful, often crippling deformities of the legs and feet. Hens' claws, which naturally get short and blunt from use, grow long and twisted. In some cases the claws literally grow around the floor of the cage, immobilizing the hen completely. Unable to reach the food, she will starve to death.

Under natural conditions, hens instinctively display complex behavioral patterns involving perching, foraging, nesting and dust-bathing. Close confinement in cages denies the opportunity to perform any of these activities. The deprivation causes chronic suffering and social conflict amongst cage mates, including bullying and feather-pecking.

Dust-bathing is performed to improve plumage condition, and rid layers of skin, mites, dirt, excess oil etc. Hens peck at the ground, then squat in the dirt and shake vigorously to work the dust up into their feathers. Birds are so motivated to dust bathe that in spite of the injuries and the bruises, they try to dust bathe again and again on the wire cage floors.

Hens are also motivated to scratch and forage for food. In natural conditions, they may spend much of the day foraging. This behavior is oppressed in battery cages, leading to compulsive behavior such as feather pecking.

Hens are strongly motivated to perch (sit and sleep on a branch). They spend third of the day perching and almost the entire night. It is not a preference - it is a need.
It has been found that when perching is possible, there is a reduction of feather pecking and feather damage, and when it is not, there is increased aggression, reduced bone strength, impaired foot condition, and higher feather loss. All are common in all commercial egg industries including "free range".

Due to their barren and monotonous surroundings, battery hens are easily startled and are prone to severe panic. Anyone who has been in a battery cage knows how the hens react when someone approaches the cage. They jump, they scream, they flap their wings in panic, run over each other trying to cling on the other side of the cage. This can spread through the whole shed and lead to a high incidence of injuries. This is how they feel every time someone gets near the cage. It is a constant nightmare.

In battery cage facilities, eggs are not laid, they are manufactured.
Taking an egg from a chicken will automatically force her to start producing another one (it takes less than 24 hours). However, the “stealing eggs” method is not enough. In order to reach the “profit satisfactory degree”, the egg industry genetically manipulates chickens to lay 15 times the amount of eggs, they would produce naturally.

Each hen produces about 300 eggs per year. This is twice as many eggs as a hen produced 50 years ago, and it is compared with only about 20 eggs produced each year by their wild ancestors. The chickens are nothing but egg machines.

Like hens in the wild, modern hens need a safe, private place to lay eggs, no chance for that, of course, when being caged with so many other birds. The process can take up to an hour or more, during which they will attempt to hide from their cage mates.
The frustration often makes them aggressive. Hens lay eggs because it is a bodily function which they have no control over, not because they are happy.

With no space or cover, the mere act of laying in a battery cage becomes an ordeal in itself. Battery hens are also denied the opportunity to perform normal pre-laying activity such as nest building. The stress and frustration that can follow, may result in stereotypical behavior. The frustration of pre-laying nesting behavior is one of the most severe distresses of hens in battery cages.

Modern eggs are too big to be laid, consequently the hens suffer form uterus "prolapse". Huge eggs pushed through the vagina of small birds, wear out the uterus that is forced to strain day after day to expel the huge eggs. The result is a prolapsed uterus to the state that it is dragged on the wire cage floor.

The battery cage has created an ugly new disease of laying hens called fatty liver hemorrhagic syndrome, characterized by an enlarged, fat, friable liver covered with blood clots, and pale combs and wattles covered with dandruff.

Calcium deficiency and osteoporosis are rampant among hens in egg factories - caused by intensive egg production and inadequate exercise. A hen will use a quantity of calcium for yearly egg production, which is 30 times greater than her entire skeleton. Inadequate calcium results in broken bones, paralysis, and even death. 35% of all mortalities during the laying cycle are attributable to bone fragility.

If five humans were squashed into a phone booth, they would probably become aggressive after a few minutes.

Hens have a 'pecking order', which refers to the natural hierarchy in a flock. In the cages, frustrated natural urges lead to more aggressive pecking, and the weaker hens who cannot escape, suffer the most. With no escape, these hens must endure the constant physical assault by the other hens.
Debeaking is carried out to reduce the damage of this behavior.
Egg producers routinely debeak chicks at 1-10 days old by cutting off up to half of the upper part of the beak and a third of the bottom with a red-hot blade or wire. This procedure is sometimes called "beak trimming". If the beaks have regrown, the producers debeak a second time just prior or during the laying period. Many of them die within 24 hours from the shock and blood loss of debeaking and many others are debeaked a third time as a result of poor procedure given the speed of the handlers – that debeak 12-15 birds a minute, one bird every 4 - 5 seconds.

Besides the immediate pain, causing the chicks to react visibly to the blade, there are also long-term effects because the beak contains sensitive nerves, which are exposed by the cutting. Because the beak is tiny and the process is mechanical and executed with "production line" speed, the beak is often excessively cut, exposing the nerves which cause severe pain every time they eat.

A hen's beak is crucial for preening, exploring, and feeding. Debeaking is done to offset the effects of the compulsive pecking that afflict birds that are built to roam, scratch, and peck at the ground all day, not sit in prison.

Debeaking is a painful injury deliberately inflicted by humans in an attempt to 'adapt the bird' to intensive systems.

The egg industry justifies the cruelty of debeaking by saying it prevents "cannibalism" among the hens. This is a deliberate deception, chickens do not and will not eat each other's flesh. Egg producers and those who support their practices use the word cannibalism to reassure potentially concerned consumers that debeaking is necessary for the safety and well-being of the hens. While cannibalism does not in fact occur, hens in factory farms do display a distorted behavior that is caused by abnormal levels of stress, crowding, and restriction of normal activities.

Due to the stressful and unsanitary living conditions, sickness and diseases are inherent problems in factory farm systems. In an attempt to minimize costs and maximize profit, even the sickest of hens are denied veterinary care.

Many hens are doomed to a cruel and prolonged death when their bodies become lodged underneath the feeding trays or trapped in the cage wire. Other hens succumb to untreated sickness, diseases and injuries. Numerous dead birds are overlooked by workers, who have neither the time nor the basic care to remove the corpses. Hens are left to slowly rot and decompose in their cages. Their cage mates are forced to live with the stench and the diseases this creates.

Forced molting is one of the most gruesome practices in animal agriculture.
The forced molt is a final way to exploit hens before they become "worthless" as egg-laying machines, at which point they are slaughtered for low-grade meat.
It entails depriving birds of food and water for up to three weeks as a way to stimulate egg-laying in hens whose bodies are already depleted.

Molting literally refers to the replacement of old feathers by new ones. In nature, birds replace all their feathers in the course of a year to maintain good plumage at all times. A natural molt often happens at the onset of winter. The hen stops laying eggs and concentrates her energies on staying warm and growing new feathers.

The egg industry exploits this natural process by forcing an entire flock to molt simultaneously. This is done to pump a few hundred more eggs out of exhausted hens because it is cheaper to "recycle" them rather than immediately slaughter them after a year of relentless egg-laying on a calcium-deficient diet.

At the end of the laying period, the hens are brutally taken out from the battery cages to the transport cages by their wings, legs, head, feet, or anything that can be grabbed. The Chicken "stuffers" are paid for speed, not gentleness.

Half-naked, from feather loss and terrorized by a lifetime of abuse, hens in transit, embody a state of fear so severe that many are paralyzed by the time they reach the slaughterhouse. By the time they are sent to slaughter, the hens are a mass of broken bones, oozing abscesses, bright red bruises, and internal hemorrhages, making them fit only for shredding into products that hide the true state of their flesh and their lives, such as chicken soups and pies, school lunches and other food programs, developed by the egg industry in order to make profits using dead laying hens in every diced up form they can think of.

Ironically, the first time battery-caged hens are able to flap their wings is when they struggle against rough handling as they are transported to the slaughterhouse. The first time they experience the outdoors is when they are sent to be slaughtered.

There is no room for sentiment at all, if it depends on humans.

The world is not just an unfair and cruel place, everything is rotten from the roots. Wake up! A world, that battery cages could have been invented in, is a world that unlegislating them won’t cure anything. The world is too sick, and life itself is the disease.
Battery cages are a symptom. One of the severest, but still a symptom.
Stop dealing with the symptoms and start dealing with the causes.