The Egg Industry: A £1bn Exercise in Suffering

Food

There are around 40 million egg-laying hens in the UK. In 2024, we ate 12.8 billion eggs—that’s about 199 per person. The egg market is worth over £1bn a year. Big money. But at what cost?

Egg-laying hens have been genetically tweaked into ultra-lean, egg-producing machines. The goal is to squeeze more of them into cages and force them to lay 300–500 eggs a year—that’s up to 50 times more than they would naturally.

At birth, female chicks spend up to 18 weeks locked indoors before they’re carted off to start their industrial-scale egg production. Some will be sent to free-range or organic farms, but the other 17 million will spend their entire lives in a cage—never seeing sunlight, never touching grass, never getting to act like real birds.

In the UK, there are three housing systems for egg-laying hens:

Caged (42%)
Free Range (including Organic) (56%)
Barn (2%)

Under all these systems, hens are crammed into massive industrial units, treated as egg-laying robots, not living creatures.

Caged

Battery cages were banned in 2012. They were replaced with ‘Enriched cages’.These hold 40–80 hens, each getting about 600cm²—the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

They stand on sloping wire mesh, under artificial light, no fresh air, no real movement. Supposedly, they have access to perches, dust baths, scratch pads—but with so many birds crammed together, only the strongest get a shot at them. Chickens are territorial, and when you pack them in like sardines, things turn nasty, fights break out, and only a handful get to use the so-called ‘enrichments’.

Credit: Tom Woollard / We Animals

Barn

Barn hens have it marginally better. They’re kept in huge sheds, sometimes with perches. But when up to 6,000 hens are packed into one barn, the same old problems arise—competition, stress, aggression. More space than caged hens, sure, but still a world away from the pastoral fantasy people imagine when they buy ‘barn eggs’.

A RSCPA assured Free range farm in the UK Credit: Rebecca Cappelli Loviconi / We Animals 2024

Free Range

The term ‘free range’ sounds lovely. In reality? Not so much.

Most so-called ‘free range’ hens live in vast barns, just like barn hens. There can be up to 10,000 in one shed. The only difference? They have access to the outside—but ‘access’ doesn’t mean they actually get to use it.

Up to 2,500 hens share a single hectare, with tiny ‘pop holes’ to let them out—spaced every 800 metres. The dominant, territorial birds guard these exits, meaning many hens never even make it outside.

Investigations by Viva! ( the vegan charity) have exposed the grim reality—shocking overcrowding, stressed birds, and conditions a million miles from the idyllic farmyard scene people imagine.

Torture

The horrendous conditions these birds endure cause extreme stress and trauma. This results in abnormal, violent behaviour—feather pecking, attacks, even cannibalism.

Credit: Rebecca Cappelli Loviconi / We Animals 2024

To stop them injuring each other, the industry resorts to beak trimming—a euphemism for slicing off up to a third of their beak with an infra-red beam. A process so painful that several European countries have banned it. The UK has debated banning it every year since 2011—but surprise, surprise, it still happens.

Credit: Tom Woollard / We Animals

Then there’s the physical toll of relentless egg-laying. Producing so many eggs strips hens of calcium, leading to osteoporosis and broken bones. They’re stood in filth, on wire mesh, which causes sores, infections, and ammonia burns.

Gassed

Male chicks are useless to the industry, so within 24 hours of hatching, they’re killed. The UK gasses around 40 million male chicks every year. Elsewhere, they’re chucked into macerators and ground up alive.

Credit: Andrew Skowron / We Animals

At around 72 weeks a hen’s productivity dips, she’s ‘spent’ industry-speak for no longer useful. Over 800,000 spent hens are killed every year, mostly by gassing. It takes up to 2.5 minutes for them to die in the gas chambers. Their bodies are turned into pet food or shipped abroad.

The Bottom Line

The industrial egg industry is systematic, large-scale torture. It reduces sentient beings to production units, treating them as machines, not animals. A billion-pound industry built on misery, cruelty, and suffering.

That’s the reality of your ‘morning eggs’...