Everyone loved the notion of cage free eggs. They were so environmentally friendly! So much nicer for the chickens. But, you know, the doomsday cult had to get involved
Cage-free eggs are likely worse for the climate. The answer isn’t to switch back to caged ones.
Popular conceptions of farming tend to associate good animal welfare with environmental virtue — an intuition so strong that researchers have described a “humane halo” effect, where consumers who are told that a farm uses better environmental practices also assume that it treats its animals well. So it might come as a surprise to hear that one way of making eggs better for the planet might be to make life a whole lot worse for the chickens who lay them.
This, anyway, was the apparent upshot of a controversial and widely discussed new paper on the environmental impacts of different egg farming systems. Cage-free, free-range, and organic eggs, it found, are higher in greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and other environmental harms than confining hens in tiny cages.
Consider the implications of that result: At any given moment, more than 8 billion egg-laying hens inhabit farms across the planet. The vast majority of them live in wire cages that severely restrict basic movements like spreading their wings and turning around. They barely have room to move around at all, which can induce depression-like states. “Hens represent the largest population of terrestrial animals housed in cages throughout their lives,” as the new study puts it.
Just go away. Leave us alone. Mind your own business. Let us eat in peace.
