Backyard chickens,it is wrong to own, use and exploit chickens

 Andrea Gil Yes, we consider it wrong. If you, or your son is not vegan, which means *no* animal products, then you are contributing to animal exploitation. There is no third choice.

The fact that your chickens and rooster have a more pleasant existence than those on commercial farms doesn't change the fact that you're exploiting them and are supporting a wider system of exploitation. They didn't appear out of nowhere, did they? Someone profited from breeding them and you supported that person in breeding them by buying them.

That breeder is without a doubt engaging torture and killing in order to make a profit out of his or her property, regardless of whether the business is "free range" or conventional. This includes killing virtually all male chicks at birth by suffocation or grinding them up while fully conscious and killing chickens after they are spent for the purpose of laying eggs or breeding: and possibly worse than this, depending on the facility, such as debeaking with a hot knife, crowded and filthy conditions and forced moulting through starvation in order to extract another egg-laying cycle out of exhausted birds prior to slaughter. By buying chickens, this is what you are supporting.

The eggs belong to the chickens, not you. Chickens normally eat some of their own eggs because they require the nutrition contained in them.

The bottom line is that neither you nor your son needs to eat eggs for health; in fact you would be healthier without them. So there is no moral justification for owning chickens as property and stealing their eggs other than that you or your son like the taste, and that is no moral justification at all. It doesn't matter how well you think you're treating your chickens--it's not about treatment; it's about use. You have no right to own them and exploit them and they have a right not to be owned and used as resources. They have inherent value; their value does not consist in providing you with eggs. They value their lives and want to lead them without interference from humans.

By owning and using chickens you are reinforcing in your own mind and that of others, most especially your son, the speciesist prejudice that animals are things for us to use. You are doing your son no favours by teaching him this unethical way of thinking. The benefit to him in you going vegan and teaching him why it's necessary to be vegan would far outweigh his enjoyment in eating eggs, and more importantly, means that you cease exploiting animals. Why put indulging your son's wholly unnecessary pleasure ahead of teaching him how to do the right thing?

So please consider going vegan. It's the morally right thing to do.