"Wegmans crowds up to nine hens into tiny, barren cages at its company-run egg facility, allowing each hen less than half a square foot of space. These animals are forced to live in their own waste and on top of the corpses of their cage-mates. A team of investigators from Compassionate Consumers found hens at Wegmans Egg Farm with severe infections and suffering from extreme dehydration. Some hens were trapped in the mesh of their cages, and others were drowning in liquid manure.quot;

"After one year in commercial egg production, the hens' egg laying rates drop off, and they are considered 'spent.' Although most spent hens are killed after one year, an average of one in five is force molted. Force molting involves keeping the birds in darkness and withdrawing food and water to shock their systems into another egg laying cycle. In recent years, with fewer and fewer slaughterhouses taking spent hens, a growing number of birds have been force molted, some more than once.

When spent layers are finally killed, about half are slaughtered for human consumption and used in soups, pot-pies and other processed foods where their bruised and battered bodies can go unnoticed. The others are ground up alive, manually decapitated, crushed, composted, or otherwise discarded because with an abundant supply of meat birds on the market, slaughterplants have little or no use for them."

"Those [birds] who don't die on the factory farm are shipped to the slaughterhouse at just a fraction of their natural lifespan. At the slaughterhouse, fully conscious chickens and turkeys are shackled by their ankles upside-down to a moving conveyor belt. The birds are then given intensely painful electric shocks, which are intended to immobilize them to make it easier to slit their throats. The shocks are frequently not powerful enough to render them unconscious. After being shocked, the birds' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, and blood begins rushing out of their bodies.

Inevitably, the blade misses some birds who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line: the scalding tank. According to USDA statistics, millions of birds every year have their bodies submerged in scalding hot water (about 143° F) while they are fully conscious. According to Virgil Butler, a former Tyson slaughterhouse worker, 'When this happens, the chickens flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. Then, they often come out the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they've struggled so much in the tank.'"

"Along with defective and slow-hatching female chicks, the U.S. egg industry trashes 250 million male chicks as soon as they hatch because roosters don't lay eggs. Instead of being sheltered by a mother hen's wings, the newborns are ground alive or thrown into trashcans where they slowly suffocate on top of one another, peeping pitifully as a human foot stomps them down to make room for more chicks."

"At a Horizon Foods organic and free-range farm, the hen sheds house more than 400,000 birds—hardly a small, natural, family-run business. Style Weekly reported that 'when you pull into the parking lot, there is not a chicken to be seen or a cluck to be heard...' Scott Akom, general manager of the Horizon farm, freely admitted that the hens do not see the light of day, and he refused to allow the reporter to actually see any of the free-range birds...When birds are given outdoor access, it's usually for very short periods of time, and the outdoor area often just consists of a hole cut in the shed wall leading to a small, muddy enclosure."