The egg industry provides Australia with roughly 5.5 billion eggs each year, being one of the most popular ways to consume protein. Due to these large numbers, the egg industry is generating an enormous customer base and profits from the torment of millions of chickens. There are approximately 16-million-layer hens in Australia, 9 million of which are housed in battery cages (RSPCA, 2021). The egg industry provides three different production systems being a cage, barn and free-range systems and pride itself on the ‘ethical’ creation of our eggs. However, in recent years, the egg industry has been scrutinised for violating the treatment of their chickens and are battling against the morals of their consumers. An investigation has been conducted for decades, trying to expose the animal cruelty behind closed doors, except the industry continues to tiptoe around the law and mask its excuses.

A major issue that has arisen during the investigation of our egg industry, is that the technicalities behind the violation of laws and rights haven’t been confirmed. For decades the industry has been able to avoid having audits done within their facilities and are deliberately exuded from legal protection under the Animal Welfare Standards and Guidelines. Investigations have shown that even the woefully minimal industry standards that are in place have little value due to a lack of oversight by industry and government. However, the public is slowly becoming more aware of the general lack of care that these cage chickens are receiving, but the suffering of these animals goes much deeper. For example, these hens aren’t able to display their natural behaviours and instincts, which alters the psychological behaviour and triggers cannibalism, aggression and feather loss from stress. Additionally, the industry is constantly performing genetic modifications to gain a larger profit at the cost of the health of their chickens. An example of this is the production rate of an individual chicken, which provides around 300 eggs a year. This is a comparison to the natural cycle of a chicken which should only be laying around 1/3 of that for reproduction reasons. Due to this pressure for production, hens are being stripped of nutrients, calcium and the physical demand is causing disease, muscle fatigue, balding, and decreasing their live span from 7 years to just 1 (RSPCA,2021). Liberation investigated Australian eggs and revealed the mass killing of male chicks as well as a painful ‘debeaking’ procedure of one-day-old hens (Animal Liberation, 2020). There is so much more involved in the suffering of these chickens that they are experiencing from birth to death, but due to the greed of the industry and demand for eggs, this conventional way of ‘farming’ isn’t moving in the direction of change.