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How many eggs would each person get to eat per year using that production method? We surely wouldn't be able to keep boiling them, frying them, using them in mo
by scandinavegan 7y ago
How many eggs would each person get to eat per year using that production method? We surely wouldn't be able to keep boiling them, frying them, using them in most baked goods, and so on, because production would drop to a fraction of what it currently is.
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.pdf 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.
- dkersten 7y agoMaybe I should have put scare quotes around “free range”, I didn’t mean free range certified or whatever, I literally meant “running around freely” like what you described on your honeymoon. > 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.