Again, eating fish or eggs does not make you vegan but pescetarian. I recommend that you update your current profile diet category. Instead of simply rebuffing your question, I will address every issue it poses.
Firstly, lets not forget how the egg industry operates regardless of how you imagine you would keep your own chickens:
http://freefromharm.org/eggfacts/
http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/factory/ALL/578/
http://www.peta.org.uk/issues/animals-not-eat/eggs/
http://www.veganpeace.com/animal_cruelty/eggs.htm
http://www.viva.org.uk/resources/campaign-materials/fact-sheets/egg-factsheet
So, your first task would be to make sure that
no form of monetary support goes towards this cruel industry however small or initial. Where were your friend's first hens born? Are you confident that it wasn't a hatchery?
Secondly I think it is important to really understand what an egg is: it is the potential for life. By destroying it, by keeping female hens separate from their natural mates (imagine the same being done to you - being forcefully segregated your whole life), we can in no way be acting on vegan principles. Eggs are essentially the product of the birds' equivalent of menstruation. Your keeping hens would be to exploit their natural facility to procreate and yet never allow them to brood. And hens
are meant to brood - they are not emotionally detached from their eggs... even those brutalised by the egg industry and later rescued will quickly rehabilitate this connection.
The painful process of egg-laying partially explains this (graphic):
https://tinyurl.com/j2tucfa
Which I'm sure is why this hen is very vocal about her delight at her new lay:
https://tinyurl.com/j7fxc9n
The process of removing the eggs from a brooding hen is a distressful one. These animals are unable to distinguish the difference between fertilised and non-fertilised eggs. So, as far as she is concerned, you would be taking away her chicks. She will continue to lay as that is her evolutionary instinct - to procreate - and yet you will continue to take this away from her. That is what she will experience. The devastating fact is that, eventually, an egg-laying hen who is unable to brood will reach a point where she becomes distressed if her eggs are not collected from her regularly - she will learn to reject these eggs - such is the psychological trauma. People who consume eggs are essentially training these birds, for profit and taste, to reject their own biological function at a most basic and evolutionary level.
Albumen, 'egg white', is the nourishment that feeds a growing chick - the equivalent of a placenta. The black dot you see on or in the 'yolk' - or, really, the ovum - is the genetic nucleus carrying the mitochondrial DNA. To be vegan is to begin to break the human/animal divide. It is vital to realise what an egg really is and to reclaim the proper language. For me there are few things in life as violating as intentionally cracking an eggshell. The act itself is a very, very destructive one when you imagine the disconnection between the genetic material that spills out... into a frying pan? The idea of eating human eggs like caviar repulses us - the fact that we see roe and 'scrambled eggs' as any different is a measure of how disconnected we have become in an age when this kind of consumption is unnecessary to our survival. Do we honestly have a right to purposefully breed another species into a state of constant dependence? Is that not one of the reasons why our presence is now being called the
Sixth Extinction on Earth? Let us not forget that keeping chickens for eggs is a less sustainable method of producing a food source than eating plants. The water consumption, resources, feed, amount to a much larger impact on our collective natural resources when it comes to keeping animals for any agricultural purpose. Whilst I would applaud your attempt at locavorism, to use your garden plot for the purpose of growing edible plants would be far more efficient. There is, however, the matter of rescuing these birds from your friend before they are prematurely killed.
So, would you allow your hen to brood? What would you then do with her chicks, if she had males? Would you guarantee their lives even though they would not be able to supply you with 'eggs'? Can you commit to providing the space and resources? To return to breeding - how has your friend controlled their pedigree? Do you realise that a wild chicken lays far fewer eggs (over 25 times less) than one that is over-bred for production and that the consequence of this, however she is looked after, is a shortened lifespan (around a fifth of what would naturally occur - up to 30 years that is) as well as a greater risk of reproductive disease? That another by-product of this over-breeding is resultant in these hens having weaker bones, leading to more fractures, because the constant process of egg-laying requires huge amounts of calcium that their bodies cannot naturally support. The leading cause of death in such hens is reproductive disease. As for veterinary care, we must also be wary of the over-use of antibiotics in
an already disastrously resistant world which costs our health services millions upon millions to try to contain. Especially if we are continually putting this into the 'food chain'. These are just a few reasons why keeping 'backyard chickens' is not generally a concept that empathetic humans can support.
Author Charles Horn points out, “If the desire is there to eat the eggs, did that consciously or subconsciously go into the decision to adopt in the first place? If so, the intention was never just one of providing refuge; it was also one of exploitation.” Therefore it is not a 'win-win' symbiosis between keeper and hen. It is therefore incorrect to say 'in exchange for this I am providing a "good" life'. There can only be complicity with the forceful re-engineering and exploitation of another being's reproductive system. The primary purpose of females, no matter what species, is surely not simply to engage in reproductive activity? Amongst humans we generally express outrage at this notion.
It is not an exceptional relationship, it is an exception that invites exceptions. As
this article points out:
“If it’s okay to eat, is it okay to gather and sell? Is it okay to adopt many chickens and make a business out of it? Again, we’re seeing how we still have a mindset of exploitation here and just how easily the slippery slope can lead people toward animal agriculture. If not them, someone else surely will, because the mindset of exploitation is still there.” [...] The popular notion that it is wrong to waste chickens’ eggs by not eating them is based on the presumption that their eggs are actually ours to waste, further reinforcing the anthropocentric notion that the eggs belong to us, not them. So, based on this logic, if we discover abandoned and unfertilised turtle eggs or robin eggs, we are also compelled to steal them and make a meal out of them so as not to let them “go to waste.”
Chickens are intelligent creatures. But even if you don't hold stock in this idea, the way we treat others has to be formed on a basis of sentience, not intelligence. Thankfully we are a society that is tolerant, for instance, toward the mentally disabled. There is no precedent for professors of the world's elite universities in deliberately inflicting harm amongst people below the status quo. So we're really only talking about
speciesism here, because
chickens are sentient and social beings: they can feel pain and they know joy too. They possess a
maternal response to distress. They can even
boast long-term memories. If you're OK with speciesism then you do have to realise that you are saying to yourself 'I do not mind living with and holding onto this
prejudice'.
Conclusion:
If we really want chickens to have 'a good life' we can no longer be a part of an ignorance that contributes to their over-breeding and subjugation (forceful dependency). All we can do is rehabilitate these animals, rescue them, and try to offer them the life they would more naturally lead so that they can - over generations - re-wild themselves. So if you are interested in providing a few hens with this, then I'd encourage you. I would encourage you to rescue them from your friend so that they are not prematurely killed. Doing so would not make you a bad person in the slightest, but a very good one. But to be really compassionate we must not only expect nothing in return,
we must demand of ourselves to take extra steps to make right through re-socialisation and other means. So you will need to think very carefully about the kind of life you will provide these birds. I don't think it is enough to say 'well, at least they are not dead' because that same justification is routinely given to the young male calves (however they are raised) who are 'allowed' to live for a mere six months longer, for veal, rather than being killed on the day they are born.
Further reading:
http://freefromharm.org/animal-prod...toddlers-a-view-of-cross-species-comparisons/
