I’m french so I have nothing to say directly about your question, but I would like to emphasize that most types of eggs are almost certainly way worse than beef and pig when considering animal suffering. Using Faunalytics estimates, eating these different dishes creates this quantity of suffering :
chicken : 0,1 animal live et 5,2 days in farm
pork : 0,002 animal life and 0,33 days in farm
beef : 0,0004 animal life and 0,33 days in farm
egg (omelette) : 0,01 animal life and 4,9 days in farm
And it doesn’t account for the relative badness of being a broiler vs a laying hen vs a pig vs a beef.
Ya, I’d be concerned about keel bone fractures in egg-laying hens, which generally seem pretty bad, and seem more common in (indoor) cage-free systems than cage ones. Welfare Footprint Project assumed multiple fracture events per hen who has any fracture across (mostly indoor, high production) systems they analyzed.
Rufener and Makagon (2020) looked at prevalences across (mostly indoor?) systems:
I’d guess fracture rates are lower for hens with lower egg production per hen, all else equal.
Yeah, keel bone fractures—and bone issues in general—is something I’d love to get more data on. I couldn’t find any publicly-available information about this for most of the farms I evaluated, but I know that Fifth Crow Farm uses heritage breeds and specifically calls out that they have healthier genetics because they lay fewer eggs (which means less calcium is spent on eggshells compared to bone growth).
I couldn’t find any information on whether other farms use heritage breeds, and I don’t know how much you can minimize the risk of fractures in other ways (providing calcium supplementation, not using e.g. forced-molting to induce extra laying cycles, giving hens plenty of outdoor space so they don’t injure themselves in stress). Have you heard anything about ways to mitigate fracture risk?
I think that my message was poorly written. I’m really not a specialist on this question so I don’t know if there exists an egg brand that doesn’t produce net suffering. I just wanted to say that the beginning of your post (“I’m not a vegan, but I’ve long felt troubled by the fact that eggs have such a high suffering-to-calorie ratio — higher, by some calculations, than beef”) seemed inaccurate.
Wait, I’m confused now. I said in my post that eggs are higher-suffering than beef according to some calculations, and you presented another calculation indicating that eggs are higher-suffering than beef, so I think we just agree?
Yep, we agree. I meant that the degree of certainty of “an egg meal produces more suffering than one beef meal” is much bigger than your formulation implied. ie : “higher, by some calculations”
I totally agree that the average cage-free hen lives a very painful life; I’m trying to figure out if there are any farms that I can buy from where this isn’t true. My best guess is that the chickens in some smaller family farms aren’t in a lot of pain—Fifth Crow Farm, which I mention above, raises heritage breed chickens in small flocks and keeps them outside except to lay and sleep. I also currently believe that the other brands I recommend have significantly lower-suffering chickens than the average cage-free organic farm chicken.
I do think that my analysis doesn’t take into account all of the things I’d like to, including whether the farm uses heritage breeds (with healthier genetics / less prone to chronic pain), whether the male chicks are killed (I’m pretty sure they always are) and if so how quickly and humanely are they killed, how well the farm cares for the health of its hens in general (I couldn’t find any data on this in the evaluation tools I used, and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it myself), and what happens to the hens after they’re too old to lay (some of these farms let their hens live out their natural lifespan on the farm; in others the spent hens are “sold live” and I don’t know what happens to them next).
Based on this comment, I’ll add these limitations to the “is this enough” section of the post.
I’m french so I have nothing to say directly about your question, but I would like to emphasize that most types of eggs are almost certainly way worse than beef and pig when considering animal suffering.
Using Faunalytics estimates, eating these different dishes creates this quantity of suffering :
chicken : 0,1 animal live et 5,2 days in farm
pork : 0,002 animal life and 0,33 days in farm
beef : 0,0004 animal life and 0,33 days in farm
egg (omelette) : 0,01 animal life and 4,9 days in farm
And it doesn’t account for the relative badness of being a broiler vs a laying hen vs a pig vs a beef.
Also, the Welfare Footprint project estimates that cage-free hens live better lifes than caged hens, but still painful lifes.
Ya, I’d be concerned about keel bone fractures in egg-laying hens, which generally seem pretty bad, and seem more common in (indoor) cage-free systems than cage ones. Welfare Footprint Project assumed multiple fracture events per hen who has any fracture across (mostly indoor, high production) systems they analyzed.
Rufener and Makagon (2020) looked at prevalences across (mostly indoor?) systems:
I’d guess fracture rates are lower for hens with lower egg production per hen, all else equal.
Yeah, keel bone fractures—and bone issues in general—is something I’d love to get more data on. I couldn’t find any publicly-available information about this for most of the farms I evaluated, but I know that Fifth Crow Farm uses heritage breeds and specifically calls out that they have healthier genetics because they lay fewer eggs (which means less calcium is spent on eggshells compared to bone growth).
I couldn’t find any information on whether other farms use heritage breeds, and I don’t know how much you can minimize the risk of fractures in other ways (providing calcium supplementation, not using e.g. forced-molting to induce extra laying cycles, giving hens plenty of outdoor space so they don’t injure themselves in stress). Have you heard anything about ways to mitigate fracture risk?
I think that my message was poorly written. I’m really not a specialist on this question so I don’t know if there exists an egg brand that doesn’t produce net suffering.
I just wanted to say that the beginning of your post (“I’m not a vegan, but I’ve long felt troubled by the fact that eggs have such a high suffering-to-calorie ratio — higher, by some calculations, than beef”) seemed inaccurate.
Wait, I’m confused now. I said in my post that eggs are higher-suffering than beef according to some calculations, and you presented another calculation indicating that eggs are higher-suffering than beef, so I think we just agree?
Yep, we agree. I meant that the degree of certainty of “an egg meal produces more suffering than one beef meal” is much bigger than your formulation implied. ie : “higher, by some calculations”
I totally agree that the average cage-free hen lives a very painful life; I’m trying to figure out if there are any farms that I can buy from where this isn’t true. My best guess is that the chickens in some smaller family farms aren’t in a lot of pain—Fifth Crow Farm, which I mention above, raises heritage breed chickens in small flocks and keeps them outside except to lay and sleep. I also currently believe that the other brands I recommend have significantly lower-suffering chickens than the average cage-free organic farm chicken.
I do think that my analysis doesn’t take into account all of the things I’d like to, including whether the farm uses heritage breeds (with healthier genetics / less prone to chronic pain), whether the male chicks are killed (I’m pretty sure they always are) and if so how quickly and humanely are they killed, how well the farm cares for the health of its hens in general (I couldn’t find any data on this in the evaluation tools I used, and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it myself), and what happens to the hens after they’re too old to lay (some of these farms let their hens live out their natural lifespan on the farm; in others the spent hens are “sold live” and I don’t know what happens to them next).
Based on this comment, I’ll add these limitations to the “is this enough” section of the post.