After seeing the suffering involved in the egg industry, many consumers may switch to products with “humane” labels, such as organic or cage-free or free-range. These labels are designed to make you feel better about your purchase, but they are deceptive.

Knowing this, some good-intentioned people decide to buy chicks and raise them to provide eggs, thinking it’s a compassionate, kind option. However, the backyard chicken industry is not an alternative to factory farming: it’s part of it. When you buy chicks online, from catalogs, or at feed stores, you’re supporting the very same types of facilities that supply large egg producers.

If you’re considering buying backyard chickens—or know someone who is—here are five important points to consider.

Males make up roughly half of all chickens hatched—and most are destroyed. Just like the egg producers, hatcheries have no use for most baby boys. They can’t lay eggs and the breeds used are typically too small for meat production.

Common disposal methods include gassing chicks; stuffing chicks into plastic bags and throwing them into dumpsters to die slowly of suffocation or exposure; electrocution; and tossing live, conscious chicks into a macerating machine that grinds them into pulp for fertilizer. The United States kills roughly 300 million baby roosters each year.

Hatcheries put day-old chicks in boxes and ship them through the mail. These journeys can take up to 72 hours and during this time, these baby animals are exposed to extremes in temperature and have little to no food or water. (Chicks can survive off of nutrients from their yolk sac for up to 24 hours after hatching. While some hatcheries will ship them with hydration supplements, it isn’t always enough to last them the journey.)

Hatcheries do this without any legal oversight. We know from past rescues just how detrimental—and fatal—this practice can be.

Chick sexing isn’t an exact science, so getting a rooster is entirely possible. However, most people ordering hens for backyard eggs don’t want roosters and, depending on where they live, they may not be able to legally keep them.

As a result, male chickens are often dumped at municipal shelters (a shelter owned and run by the government) where they’re typically euthanized. Others are abandoned, facing harsh weather, starvation, and predators. Remember, chickens are domesticated animals and have difficulty surviving in the wild on their own.

In 2021, we were contacted about more than 4,000 chickens in need, including roosters—more than any rescue network could hope to accommodate. Learn more about the roosters at Farm Sanctuary.

The mass production of eggs is not natural—nor is it healthy for the hen.

The domesticated chicken’s original ancestor, the red jungle fowl, lays 10-15 eggs per year. In 1925, laying hens were bred to produce an average of 112 eggs per hen. By 2020, through intensive breeding for increased egg production, laying hens had been manipulated to produce an average of 296 eggs per hen!

This unnatural rate of production may result in painful and often fatal health conditions, including:

• Depleting hens’ body of calcium, leaving them susceptible to osteoporosis: the premature break down of their bodies.
• Reproductive cancers and other diseases.
• Prolapse, which is when the hen’s vent or cloaca is inverted and pushed to the outside of the body.
• Peritonitis, which is when the yolk from a developing, incompletely shelled, or ruptured egg is deposited within the body cavity.
• Impacted oviducts, which happen when a fully formed egg lodges in the shell gland or vagina and continues to grow.

Domesticated chickens have much shorter lives—but they can live beyond their egg-producing years.

The manipulation caused by breeding for intense egg production significantly shortens a hen’s life. A ​​red jungle fowl can live up to 30 years in the wild. A domesticated hen’s life expectancy is just six to eight years.

What’s more, a hen’s egg production slows down within two to three years. In a farm setting, this is the age they would be slaughtered. Some people kill backyard hens who no longer lay eggs, replacing them with new chicks—furthering the cycle of abuse and exploitation.

When people visit Farm Sanctuary, they’re often surprised by chickens’ strong personalities, their ability to form friendships, and their capacity for curiosity—including a deep fascination with many of the humans who visit our Sanctuaries.

Visit our species page to discover the history of chickens, facts about their natural behavior, and truths about factory farming. Or dig deeper into their sentience and download the white paper, Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken.

The good news is that there is a way for well-informed and prepared caregivers to provide homes for chickens without supporting cruel industry practices: Adopt!

• Join the rescue movement: Our Farm Animal Adoption Network connects abused, neglected, and unwanted farm animals, including roosters and hens, with loving homes.
• Symbolically Adopt a Farm Animal: Make a difference in the life of a farm animal by sponsoring one of our residents today! Through our Adopt a Farm Animal program, you can make a monthly or annual contribution to provide the necessary support to care for a rescued farm animal.