Cartons stamped with the Certified Humane or Animal Welfare Approved seal are good bets—both of which are administered by third-party groups.
Chefs around the country are putting their spins on classic Thanksgiving dishes — and putting them in to-go boxes for you to feast on at home. As new, cool food brands have popped up all over Instagram, so have brick-and-mortar stores dedicated to collecting them all in one place. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Filed under: What's the Difference? Pocket Flipboard Email. Unable even to spread their wings, caged laying hens are among the most intensively confined animals in agribusiness.
Caged hens also suffer from the denial of many natural behaviors such as nesting, perching, and dustbathing, all important for hen welfare. Numerous scientists and other experts PDF have spoken clearly about the animal welfare problems with battery cages. One such scientist, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Konrad Lorenz, said:. For the person who knows something about animals it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow cagemates to search there in vain for cover.
Because of public opposition to battery cage confinement, many egg producers are switching to cage-free systems. There are so many terms. Try to look them up on the U. While egg labels can be helpful and effective, some tell you what the hens were fed and others tell you a bit about their environment.
Still, others tell you how humanely they were raised. But, you need to know what to look for. Organic : This means that hens received organic feed and were not raised in cages. Also, an organic label says nothing about humane treatment. Omega-3 enriched: Egg yolks contain a small amount of omega-3, a heart-healthy fat. However, providing hens a diet high in omega-3, such as flaxseed or fish oil, can boost the omega-3 content in their eggs. They argue for considering free range an "optional component" of cage-free production.
In other words: don't go actively looking for free-range eggs. Cage-free alone is good, and in some cases even better than free range. Producers of organic eggs in the US have to provide some outdoor access, raising similar concerns as non-organic free-range eggs; they must be cage-free as well.
But organic producers also aren't allowed to provide synthetic amino acids to chickens even though those acids significantly improve chickens' nutrition and overall health , and are restricted in their usage of antibiotics. As a result, hens suffer. A number of animal scientists in the US believe organic production is cruel to hens for this reason. Add in the fact that organic eggs aren't any better for you — just like most organic foods — and you have a pretty good case for preferring non-organic cage-free eggs to organic ones.
Organic's still better than caged eggs, to be sure, but the policies toward antibiotics and amino acids are cruel. The most rigorous animal welfare certification program when it comes to eggs is Animal Welfare Approved. Their logo is a white sun with blue rays over a green pasture:.
As the Humane Society of the United States explains, AWA has the highest standards of any private animal welfare auditing program for eggs. It prohibits producers from beak cutting, in which farmers remove part of newborn hens' beaks to prevent pecking, and from starving birds to force them to molt, another unfortunately common practice.
But AWA-approved eggs can be hard to come by. A second-best option is Certified Humane, which bans forced molting but not beak cutting. Both AWA and Certified Humane free range require outdoor access, for better or worse Certified Humane has different levels of certification; the basic level doesn't require outdoor access. Certified Humane is a lot easier to find in the grocery store, with brands like Nellie's and Open Nature making the cut. The logo is pretty easy to spot:. And a lot of common labels tell you nothing at all about chicken treatment: vegetarian-fed, natural, farm fresh, fertile, omega-3 enriched, pasteurized, etc.
That said, many animal advocates would urge consumers to not just buy better eggs but to reduce egg consumption in general. One reason is that a lot of the eggs we eat don't take the form of eggs we buy in cartons, but come in mayonnaise, salad dressings, frozen foods, restaurant meals, and other contexts where it's hard to judge where the eggs came from, and what conditions the hens were raised in. More importantly, though, most hatcheries that supply hens to farms — even cage-free or free-range farms — use a practice called "chick culling," in which male chicks are slaughtered en masse, usually by grinding them alive:.
Gassing is also sometimes used.
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