Shoppers have been urged to reject brown eggs in favour of white eggs. Apparently, breeds that produce brown eggs are typically more aggressive to one another, so they are debeaked via an infrared amputation process that is thought to be very painful. White hens, by contrast, are quite civil, so there is less cruelty involved in the intensive harvesting of their issue.
It feels a tiny bit as though farmers are repackaging their cruel beak-ectomies as the consumer’s responsibility. It also, at the risk of being overemotional, sounds as though aggressiveness may not be innate to the brown-egg layers. It could just be the conditions they have to live in, on a busy production line, that may make them aggressive to the point of homicide and (apparently) cannibalism.
Richard Jackson, the vice-president of the British Veterinary Poultry Association, has said: “It would be too much of a generalisation to say white-feathered hens are always docile.” To put that a less diplomatic way, let’s see how docile they are when it is their job to produce 11bn eggs a year, as opposed to the 45m white-egg layers lay.
Nevertheless, this overwhelming preference of the British shopper is interesting. White eggs are actually quite hard to sell into supermarkets, so strongly do people lean towards brown, and get off-loaded instead into processors. The history of brown-egg dominance is dispiriting: nationally, we preferred white eggs until the 70s, when we switched to brown, believing them to be more natural, rustic and, crucially, healthier. This coincided almost exactly with the concept of brown bread as the health-food option, which was true, the Chorleywood process of speeding up fermentation and overprocessing white bread having been invented in 1965. So, en masse, we concluded that brown things were healthier than white things, a nonsensical position we have cleaved to.
Studies have shown that chickens are highly intelligent: they can count and have self-awareness. This on its own is enough reason to stop chopping their beaks off.
