The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

128 / the world peace diet
the choking stench of ammonia in the air from the piles of manure
under the cages and you don’t feel at all well; the flies are unbearable
despite the insecticide sprayed in the air and laced in your food—to
kill the fly larvae before they mature; the food—never green and
fresh—seldom varies and tastes always of the chemical additives and
drugs needed to keep you alive; eventually, despite your wretchedness
and anguish, and the tormented din of thousands of birds
shrieking their pain together, you lay an egg and watch it roll out of
sight; but the joy of making a nest, of giving birth, of clucking to
your chicks is absent—laying the egg is an empty, frustrating, and
exhausting ritual. 32
All family and social and natural life is destroyed. These hens know
neither mothers nor children, neither mates nor earth nor sun. They are
born in hatcheries, debeaked and then sentenced to the caged slavery of
egg production.
When a population of thousands of hens in an egg operation is at
the end of its laying cycle, the hens will either be gassed and killed, since
their tortured bodies have so little flesh they aren’t worth the trouble of
shipping to slaughter, or they may be slaughtered for the low-grade
meat used in chicken soup and pet food. Often, though, the hens are
force-molted first, to shock their bodies into another cycle of egg laying.
This is done by withholding food and water and administering a combination
of drugs, including hormones. The forced starvation may last
up to two weeks, typically killing many birds in the process. After they
have been force-molted once or twice, soon to be slaughtered for chicken
soup, the birds are roughly yanked from their cages, tossed into
trucks, and taken away to make room for the next wave of hen slaves.
We can perhaps be born into no worse hell in this universe than being a
female chicken on an industrial egg farm in the United States.
In so-called free-range egg operations the hens are all typically
debeaked, as in standard egg factories, and males are all brutally killed
at birth. The chickens are still treated as objects, pushed to produce, and
killed cruelly when they are no longer profitable. The term free-range
has surprisingly little legal meaning, and there are thus no rules govern-