Photo by Unparalled Photography, Aug. 24, 2022

Our Letters to LA Times Chide Egg Shortage Complaints: UPC President Karen Davis & UPC Member Elaine Livesey-Fassel

Letters to the Editor

Re: “$7 a dozen? Why California eggs are so expensive — and increasingly hard to find,” Jan. 7

To the editor: This longtime animal advocate stopped purchasing eggs when I discovered how much factory-farmed chickens suffered. Now I enjoy a healthy plant-based diet.

I am also aware that there is no such thing as “cheap” in any field, and this is especially true in animal agriculture. The sentient creatures who are the unwilling part of this industrial system pay for that “cheapness” with brutal, short existences.

So, to learn that many consumers are now grumbling about high prices for eggs does not worry me. If customers knew of the inhumane practices to which chickens are subject, would they still hunger for eggs and meat?

I would hope that many would reject this cruelty and say that $7 is far too small a price to pay for it.

Elaine Livesey-Fassel, Los Angeles

To the editor: It is heartening that many states are passing legislation to provide at least a modicum of “welfare” laws on behalf of farmed animals.

As for egg shortages, please. Birds and pigs since a year ago or more have been tortured to death slowly in the procedure of mass extermination known as “ventilation shutdown-plus.”

In this process, they are deprived of air to breathe and subjected to extreme heat designed to induce heatstroke. Anyone with a conscience who has watched chickens and pigs dying under this merciless procedure can only be sickened by the bottomless cruelty of agribusiness and the helpless agony of our innocent victims.

As long as chickens are forced to live in squalor, avian influenza will recycle. This is “egg-xactly” a fact.

Karen Davis, Machipongo, Va.

The writer is president of the group United Poultry Concerns.