[dhosek]

It’s more a rhetorical thing than a reality. The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,¹ but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

⸻

1. Back in the 00s, I would buy our weekly supply of eggs from a woman who sold eggs at the Beverly Hills farmer’s market. She had photo albums of the chickens at the farm. One Sunday morning, I overslept and arrived towards the end of the market. The egg lady had no eggs, but was selling whole chickens out of a cooler. I was relieved to discover that she’d just sold out of eggs and the chickens she was selling as meat weren’t the hens who laid the eggs (although still, chickens were slaughtered to make meat). And yes, I’m the kind of urban hypocrite who is happy to eat meat as long as he doesn’t have to think about how it transformed from an animal into a food.

[hermitcrab]

>The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,

Doing that in your backyard with a few chickens sounds great.

>but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

Much uglier at any sort of commercial scale.