When a chicken lays an egg

[*crikey*mate*]

does it hurt?

[*elizabeths-mum*]

My chooks won't be putting any farmers out of business. 😄

[*crikey*mate*]

LOL EM, wasn't it you that said one doesn't lay and the other only does it sometimes and you spend a fortune buying chicken feed and eggs?

If it was, that post made me laugh.

[patchoo78]

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@am*3 wrote:

Yes, there is lots of suffering & pain in the world and our petty annoyances and grievances don't rate a mention compared to that.

Caged Hens

• A battery hen spends her entire life laying cramped inside a shared cage.
• She will never see the sky.
• Each cage holds 3 to 7 hens.
• Each hen's floor area is only 450 cm squared, about 3/4 of the size of an A4 sheet of paper.
• With her wings outstretched, a hen is twice the size of a typical battery cage.

The caged hens look so bad, crikey, when they hen farmers don't want them anymore. Some people adopt them and give them a good, happy home. I had some friends do that...they were tragic looking things.. their feathers get rubbed off in places from rubbing against the cage and they are scrawny.

In Australia, caged eggs come from the 10.5 million caged hens in battery farms.

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Not to mention the de-beaking so they don't attack each other.. 

I get that, but are we inflicting our feelings onto the chickens? Do they really feel what we do iykwim? Do they feel bad about the conditions in which they are kept if they don't know any differently?

What kind of question is that? Of course they suffer.. Wouldn't you suffer if you were kept in a cage all your life and couldn't stretch your legs? animals have feelings too, they are sentient beings, they feel pain and suffering just like humans do.. 

Are you trying to rationalise buying caged eggs?

[catsnknots]

Eggs are soft shelled when they are inside the chicken.. it is not until they pop out that they harden up... they do not cause any pain at all. 

the clucking they make after an egg is hatched is to let everyone know what they have done..sort of boasting in the chicken world. 

[joz*garage]

Eggs are soft shelled when they are inside the chicken.. it is not until they pop out that they harden up

soft shells are due to the lack of calcum in chicken feed, when first layed they are hard, speaking of experience of course, i watched one lay an egg in the middle of the backyard, picked it up and the egg was as hard as a rock

[catsnknots]

They are not soft like squishy soft.. but warm and slightly soft so that they can exit the chook. My kids would often watch the chook lay and egg and grab it as soon as it was laid and they were always soft, they harden up on contact with air... something about the reaction of the calcitite to the air. The shape of the egg is because of the pushing the egg out of the oviduct.

[joz*garage]

turtle eggs are soft when first layed arent they, i dont think thats true with chook eggs

i bet clair knows

[joz*garage]

Meanwhile, a membrane forms around the inside uterine wall, which seals in the egg cell, yolk and albumen. Eventually a mixture of water, salt and calcium surround this membrane and form a thin but structurally sturdy outer shell. This shell is molded in the shape of the uterine wall, thus giving a chicken's egg its distinctive shape. While in the uterus, the egg's narrower end points downward, but it will later turn and be ejected wider end first.

http://www.wisegeek.org/how-exactly-do-chickens-lay-eggs.htm