04/09/09 From Eggshell to Gas Chamber
Animal Friends will be "lying dead" by the giant Easter egg pointing out the cruelty of egg industry
- One killed male chicken per every new "egg-laying hen"
It is Easter time and people thoughtlessly buy and use eggs. Therefore Animal Friends wants to warn about the mass killings of male chickens as "unwanted products" of the egg industry.
In order to draw attention of the public and to expose the truth about the merciless egg industry, which for the sake of profit, kills over 5 billion newly hatched male chickens treated merely as the byproduct in the process of breeding egg-laying hens, Animal Friends again before Easter announces a shocking performance.
The action will take place on Thursday, April 9, 2009, on Josip Jelacic Square at 12 noon. The nearly-naked activists painted in yellow will be lying under a giant Ester egg thus demonstrating the destiny of newly hatched living beings who are killed on the very same day they were born.
Chickens are hatched in so called egg-hatching factories where they are warmed by incubators instead of their mothers' feathers and instead of the voice and the heartbeat of their mother, they can hear only the humming of the ventilators. Shortly after hatching, chickens are on their way to a conveyor from where they are taken away by experts who routinely discard male chicks, throwing them away in garbage cans. In those cans they suffocate because of overcrowding, or they end up in gas chambers or directly in the grinding machines. Those never-to-become roosters, who according to new research, are capable of understanding even basic arithmetic, and more importantly, feel pain and desire joy but never get to at least see the light of day. Their first day of life is also their last.
Their sisters continue their way to horrid conditions in battery cages or overcrowded "free range" hangars. They are condemned to constant egg laying until, totally exhausted, they wind up loaded onto trucks and on their way to slaughterhouses before being replaced with new victims of the egg industry. This industry produces over 50 million tons of eggs per year to satisfy the enormous human appetite for a completely unnecessary product, which is also a cholesterol bomb and potential cause of salmonella.
Animal Friends calls everyone to come and see a short video about male day-old chickens that will be projected during the demonstration and can be also seen on the Animal Friends YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/afcroatia, and most of all, to consider stopping eating eggs.