Steve wrote:
Respectfully, how did you make this determination? This seems like an arbitrary figure you came up with to support your views.
Most male chicks are killed (save a small number of breeding stock)
Cost x 2 (to support the cost of taking care of the males).
Chickens are killed far short of their natural life spans, which is 15 - 20 years, when egg production drops- which is usually around 2-3 years of age, but I'm being very generous and saying 5 years (which is for most unreasonably long).
Assuming a 15 year average (again, being conservative):
Cost x 3 (to support a natural lifespan instead of killing the chickens when they're young)
Now we have a x 6 cost.
A $2 egg is about the cheapest you'll find for "free range", which is basically factory farming with loopholes, up to $5 is more typical for something more believable (for smaller farms, better feed, more grass area, etc.). You'd have to examine details of the conditions of these different farms to determine which ones were really decent; I'd be inclined to believe a $4 egg could have been from a farm with conditions half decent during the time the chicken was allowed to live.
That accounts for spillage and other factors in shipping, so if you multiply $4 x 6 = $24
Veterinary costs also increase greatly after the first few years of life; $100 a year is pretty typical, for reasonable medical care. Not only are they living longer at normal cost, but costs increase with age (feed cost isn't very consequential).
If you want to do it another way:
If you really push it, a chicken might lay 1,000 eggs in a lifetime; that's 83 and a third dozen.
Let's imagine this is a fantasy world where distribution and packaging are free, and there's no spillage at all (that's completely unreasonable, but I'm being very generous here).
At $24 a dozen, with a chicken living 15 years (completely ignoring the fact that half the chicks are killed, and imagining somebody came up with a way to do sex selective abortions - or just saying we don't even care about the male chicks that are ground up), that's only $133.33 a year, as a budget to take care of the average chicken.
That's a tight budget on its own (just basic care, feeding, and medical as mentioned); you'd be hard pressed to take care of a pet chicken on that (which was the standard mentioned). Assuming you have a bigger farm and you're getting bulk rates on things, it's conceivable.
But then, let's step back into the reality of distribution costs, spillage, etc. You're looking at a budget closer to half of that. Highly impractical, and unlikely, but on the outside marginally conceivable.
I said
at least $24, because that was low-balling it.
Respectfully, Steve, these are obvious factors that thirty seconds of research would have revealed, which is why I didn't bother to break them down. I'm a bit amazed at your skepticism, but it highlights your ignorance of the industry.
I don't pull numbers out of the air to support my views- quite the contrary, my views are based on the numbers. Unlike yours, I suspect, given your ignorance of said numbers.
If you're interested in this topic (or interested in being a morally decent human being), please do the research for yourself. You will come to the same conclusion.
I'm not inherently against using animals for any purpose (there are many purposes for which I support animal use), but some things are just inherently cruel and inefficient to the point that doing them is just wholly irrational.
