Happy Clucks

For along time now, Chris and I have only bought free-range eggs. After having seen some of the horrifying videos of how chickens are treated, it only seems right somehow. Don’t get me wrong. All in all, I am a country boy and don’t have a lot of sympathy for animals that we eat, for the most part I consider animals to be beyond stupid and almost deserving of being my main course. I have no intention of becoming a full-fledged vegetarian (I have tried it before, several times, in fact, all unsuccessful. Well, maybe I should say ‘successful’ up until the point that I started to crave steak or bacon.)

Anyway…

I digress.

What a surprise.

As many of you who read this blog may have surmised, I am rather proud of my adopted country. The inroads that this society has made concerning environmental standards, aiding the poor, the sick, etc. are all things to be proud of. But even I was pleasantly surprised at the progress I just learned of. Chickens in Germany will no longer be allowed to be held in cages beginning in 2009.

The government has not imposed this law upon the economy willy-nilly. They made the decision based on animal cruelty standards. Since the announcement that the new law will go into affect, it has observed that non-free-range-eggs have gone down in production from 90% to 68%. This is a trend which they expect will continue throughout the year.

This is a socialistic government at work. What this means for me is that my omelets will eventually get cheaper, since I have always made them with the more expensive free-range eggs. The omelets my naughty neighbors have made using eggs from caged hens will get more expensive, but only for a time until supply and demand takes care of that. For years, we have bought free-range eggs as a way of voting our opinion with our dollars. Other people were obviously doing the same, and it paid off by basically punishing those cruel individuals who either did not know or did not care about where eggs come from. (This is an opening for my vegetarian readership to go off on me about meat in general.)

(This idea of voting with the dollar is partially a response to one of my comments from a previous blog entry about crossing the Atlantic on a freighter. The author of the comment pointed out that I should just fly in any case because even if I were to boycott the airline flight, the plane would fly anyway. This is true in the short-term, but, eventually, if more and more people refuse to fly, there will be fewer and fewer flights scheduled, and, therefore, fewer emissions.)

Well, I guess the main point is that I find this egg decision to be a very advanced principle for an industrialized nation of 80 million. We should not treat the animals that we raise for food so badly. They should be raised humanely. After all, our ability to rise above or own barbarism is what separates us from our food!

This whole discussion remind me of a commercial. I like the cat best: