It just seems like the math doesn’t add up. Like I eat a healthy diet and I get tired just pooping out the bad stuff, meanwhile a chicken can eat non stop corn and have enough “good” stuff left over to create and throw away an egg the size of their head, every day.
In: 11289
Farm chickens have been bred to eat a lot and make an egg every day. The chickens that laid the most eggs the easiest were actively selected by farmers to reproduce so that they could have better and better chickens and more and more eggs.
Eli5 is they don’t have the spare resources. It takes a *massive* toll on their bodies.
Wild chickens will lay 10-20 eggs a year. The breeds that lay roughly an egg a day have been ~~naturally selected~~ artificially selected to lay around 200 eggs a year. This is indeed impossible to sustain. In studies, the vast majority of laying hens have bone fractures because those resources weren’t spare. Their bodies can’t support this. The best equivalent (not perfect, but as a simple comparison) is if human women were bred until they have their heaviest day of a period every day. You can imagine that wouldn’t be sustainable.
As a result the chickens inevitably burn out and can’t produce at that rate as their bodies deteriorate. And so once they’re not profitable, then they’re sent to the slaughterhouse.
Edit: thanks for the love, all. Edit on the strikethrough for correct term.
It is indeed good to know where your food really comes from and thus if you really want to keep eating eggs or any other animal part. Feel free to PM if you want advice on turning vegan. We’d love to help.
To answer a common point, backyard hens can (and do) live much longer and keep laying eggs. Part of this is being fed much more. They’re supplemented too. Of course better conditions will help, that’s true. The breed is still in pain laying so often. Some rescue places will use birth control so the hens don’t lay as often (this improves other health outcomes too). The main point is it’s also not profitable on a large scale. The price of eggs would maybe triple or more if that was the norm. So I’m of course speaking of how the vast vast majority are made. And again the short answer for OP is it’s not sustainable. Those chickens were artificially created by humans to lay so many and it hurts to do so. It will take its toll on the chicken’s health, bones, and mind.
For those wanting the studies, this isn’t a controversial point in general that laying hens get frequent fractures but this is the [latest systematic review I](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7433929/) read. There’s a LOT of links there from various countries with estimates.
You’ve got a big ol’ brain that takes a lot of energy just keeping running even if you just sit on the couch all day.
Meanwhile, while chickens aren’t particularly dumb, they’re not expending anywhere close to the same amount of energy just keeping the lights on.
Plus you know, an egg is only 78 calories. For a 1.5kg hen, it’s around 175 calories just for body maintenance and another 100 for egg production. You can consume 275 calories in a big bite and 4+ times that in a single meal.
Edit: As I’ve gotten a few comments suggesting chickens are dumb, here’s an article and a study addressing that.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-startling-intelligence-of-the-common-chicken1/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5306232/
Egg-laying hens (like all farmed animals) are bred to prioritize production over the long-term health of their own bodies, so they’re not just using “spare resources.” They’re only given those resources in order to produce eggs. My friends who run bird sanctuaries talk about the terrible condition of hens coming even from free-range operations.
TL;DR: All their food consumption goes into laying eggs, they can’t do this for more than a couple years, and are euthanized the moment their laying rate drops.
Layer hens eat a lot. They eat around half their body weight in feed weekly, and they need a lot of protein. They’re kept in appalling, confined conditions where they don’t spend much energy beyond laying eggs, so all their energy and protein goes into eggs.
The reason is breeding. Wild chickens, or breeds not designed for egg production, lay only around an egg a month. Layer hens (not the same breeds as those you eat, which are called broilers) lay an egg a day and this is not great for long-term health.
They also only can maintain this rate for a short period in their lifespan. The average layer hen is allowed to live only about 2 years in a factory, because after that their productivity rate drops off and the cost of feed for them becomes less efficient. They are rarely slaughtered for meat, because layers are not as plump as broilers and do not meet supermarket customer expectations for dinner. Most layer hens are gassed with CO2 and processed for animal feed or fertilizer, or just buried in landfills.
[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/egg-laying-hens_n_59c3c93fe4b0c90504fc04a1](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/egg-laying-hens_n_59c3c93fe4b0c90504fc04a1)
In traditional farms, layer hens may live longer, since they are allowed to forage which reduces feed costs. But they rarely are kept for more than a few years due to declining egg production. Layer hens can live naturally to about 8 years, compared to wild junglefowl who live up to 20.
Chickens cant produce an egg a day on pure corn, they have to be fed extra protein and a bunch of calcium.
Oh h*ck there’s a [Sam O’Nella video that explains this very well!](https://youtu.be/_NSekwyS4Ns)
TL;DW: we domesticated chickens after seeing their reproductive cycles accelerate dramatically when they’re provided with lots of food. Well fed chickens are just evolutionarily wired to lay tons of eggs when they have secure food around.
Selective breeding mostly.
The wild undomesticated ancestor of our chickens just lays enough eggs to sustain the population. Maybe a dozen per year.
We have been breeding chickens to be better livestock for thousands of years. We have been selecting the ones that were better eating or laid more eggs every generation and also selected for traits that made them better at being kept by humans than their wild cousins.
Surprisingly enough, while we have been doing it for 5000 years or so, much of the “progress” has happened in the last century.
Chickens kept by farmers a century ago had less meat on them and laid fewer eggs than their modern counterparts.
It took as 5000 years to go from 12 eggs per year to 120 and a century to go from 120 to +300 eggs per year.
The chicken from a century ago looked much more like their wild ancestors than modern ones who have grown to comparatively enormous sizes.
None of this is particularly healthy for the chicken and the way we keep them is not really helping things either.
But that is okay the ones meant to be eaten only have to live long enough to become big and fat before they are processed and the ones laying eggs may have a short live laying eggs, but new egg layers are relatively easy to come by. It doesn’t take long to go from a freshly hatch chick to a chicken old enough to lay eggs herself (Don’t google what happens to the freshly hatched male chicks who can’t grow up to become egg layers, they are too small and numerous to easily kill the way you would kill animals normally and the alternatives people have come up with may seem quite horrible.)
The ancestors of chickens came from southeast Asia where bamboo is plentiful. Bamboo coasts along for several decades or even over a century minding its own business, Then all of it in an area blooms. This can happen in a single year or over multiple years.
When the bamboo is blooming, the seeds are incredibly abundant. The proto-chickens were adapted to take advantage of this large food supply by pumping out lots of eggs when there is a lot to eat.
Domestic chickens carry this further.
I have my own chickens. To lay eggs at that rate, which they do, requires a lot of eating. Mine roam free in a forest and devour worms and bugs and vegetation at a ferocious rate. Their store-bought food is also heavily fortified with calcium and I dry and crush the shells of eggs I’ve used and toss them on the ground for the chickens to eat. Corn, although they do like it, is not a good food. Even cracked or softened, it doesn’t have the nutrients they need.
Egg label fact- the best label to see at your store is pasture raised. Free range chickens still don’t have much space. Pasture raised is the most humane.
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