Eat Eggs From Sick Mistreated Hens, Expect to Get Sick

Factory-produced eggs are sick eggs. The recent US outbreak of salmonella, with a belated recall of more than half a billion eggs, should surprise no one. Salmonella-laced eggs are commonplace in supermarkets. It isn’t that there’s a new outbreak, but that the number of salmonella cases has increased.

Factory Production of Eggs

Most of our eggs are produced by sick chickens. They are massively crowded in horrific conditions with no access to fresh air, often not even room enough to take a single step—and they spend their entire lives like this. Chickens normally establish an order by pecking. Existing in these crowded conditions makes it impossible for them to satisfy this need, so they would peck each other to death, except that their beaks are cut off when they’re chicks. This mutilation is done by cutting through living, bleeding tissues without any sort of anesthetic.

These birds are pumped full of antibiotics. They produce antibiotic-filled eggs—and obviously, they still produce eggs contaminated with salmonella. One must wonder if the real reason behind the increase in reported salmonella in people is actually a result of a new drug-resistant form.

One of the producers of these sick eggs is Wright County Eggs, owned by Jack DeCoster of Galt, Iowa. The state’s attorney general has labeled him a “habitual violator” of environmental laws. He has allowed chicken and hog manure to run directly into a creek. For this, he had to pay a $150,000 fine—hardly enough to even factor in as a cost of doing business on his scale of production.

DeCoster pled guilty to ten counts of animal cruelty for the routine mistreatment of chickens. Mercy for Animals had done an undercover investigation of his “farm”. Aside from routinely cruel treatment by employees, they documented hens so crowded that they couldn’t lift their wings without getting them snagged in cage wires. Rotting chicken corpses were removed from the cages of hens that were producing eggs sold for human consumption.

If you buy supermarket eggs, this is what you’re supporting:

• The institutionalized mistreatment of hens and chicks.

• The massive use of antibiotics in an attempt to kill the natural result of such an environment: disease.
• Your own ingestion of antibiotics.
• The development of drug-resistant bacteria.
• The destruction of the environment, including the poisoning of rivers and oceans.
• The ever-increasing risk that you or your loved ones will succomb to a drug-resistant disease.

Salmonella Is Common, But the FDA Doesn’t Care

The FDA reports that the CDC “normally” receives about 50 reports of Salmonella enteritidis (the particular variety, among dozens, in question here) each week. In late June/early July, they started to receive reports of about 200 cases per week, quadruple the so-called “normal” number. Nothing was done about it then.

It wasn’t until the 13^th of August that recalls were initiated—well over two months later.

Read the rest here.