Is there such a thing as an egg hatchery where chicks are not killed?!

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No. For one thing it wouldn't make sense profit wise and the only reason people use and abuse animals like that is for profit. Egg hatcheries of all types get rid of male chicks and also are cruel to egg laying hens and the few tiny miniscule places that don't kill the male chicks and are slightly less cruel are still keeping those animals as their property and use them for their product.

At sanctuaries the eggs can be put into the fridge and that stops the development process so no new birds are created and the ones that would not be fertilized are usually cooked and fed back to the birds as a treat. Since the birds made the eggs, those eggs are theirs and only theirs.

You must really ask yourself: Would I want to be a slave? If your answer is no which most people would agree with then you should extend that too everyone. Chickens don't want to be shoved into cages or warehouses or tiny coops and have their eggs taken from them all the time and 99.9% of the time being mistreated. Plus the male chicks are useless so it wouldn't ever really make sense for them to be kept alive or treated well.

Daisy's answers are sometimes interesting but she doesn't understand veganism and is honestly only here to troll around not as an idiot troll but as one of those wannabe educated types who thinks they know everything yet they haven't yet gotten the basics down. She can easily find the definition of veganism but chooses to ignore it and make up silly assumptions and in some cases falsities so she can continue her lifestyle of cruelty and abuse towards animals. If she can find a "flaw" in veganism that somehow makes her lifestyle ok which is a silly excuse.


Karen Davis and UPC is a great resource on chickens and other domesticated fowl and her sanctuary is awesome with some really cool rescued birds:
http://www.upc-online.org/
http://www.upc-online.org/freerange.html
She is a wealth of knowledge. Every time I talk with her I learn something new about chickens

vegan because animals are not property

Sure, when the chicks hatch and are culled for processing and sexed, some may say the males are killed, but as a broiler and roaster chicken are only raised for 4-8 weeks, it is no longer an issue, older matured de-sexed males known as "Capons" still exist, and are nice, you can in most country's and large city's keep a few chickens for egg production, it is up to the city's by-laws, but they can be noisy and your neighours may be unhappy.

If you don't keep a rooster with the hens, you won't have baby chicks, just infertile eggs. If you do allow eggs to hatch, you don't have to kill the chicks. You'll just increase your flock size. You'll have more poop to deal with, need more feed and more enclosures....and as those chicks' chicks mature you'll have even more eggs to hatch, more poop....and the circle would continue to grow.

I would suggest (if you must eat eggs) to go to a local farm and talk to the owner. Or go to a farmer's market (they have winter ones too if it is cold).

Talking to the owner at a local small farm would be the only real way to get eggs in a less-cruel way.

I think you're confused about eggs. As Daisy says, they are only fertile if an intact rooster has been at the hen. Hens still lays eggs even if there is no rooster, but those eggs will never hatch. So at Farm Sanctuary, for instance, they neuter all the males (of all the animal types, BTW). Then they take the eggs, which are infertile, and grind them up to feed them back to the chickens.

Another note, you may sometime hear of eating fertile eggs. This is when the males and females are together, but you just eat the eggs before they have begun to develop. They would become chicks if left to incubate, but people eat them first. They look and taste exactly the same.

I heard a podcast on your subject, and I liked her reasoning. If you had rescued hens and they laid eggs, she felt you could ethically eat them, though she wasn't sure it was a good idea nutritionally or habit-wise, and certainly not necessary. However, if you purchase your chicks from a hatchery, and tell them you only want females, what are they going to do with the brothers? Males of egg-laying breeds are not popular. Except for a few for breeding, there would be no reason to let them live long - just as a matter of economics you can see that they would be killed either as chicks or possibly, on a smaller farm, for meat. No one is going to feed roosters for nothing.

You are talking about wanting to continue to eat eggs at home. But home is the place where it's easy to *not* eat eggs. Baking substitutes work really well (I just answered one about that: and scrambled eggs or egg-salad sandwiches can be made from tofu. Eating out is the larger problem for most people, and that is where you will not be able to control the source. So you're trying to "get around" the easiest problem.

Anyway, good luck!

Oh, I wanted to add one thing to an already long answer. My neighbor keeps hens for eggs, and they have told us they don't plan to kill them. She was really surprised when I politely declined her offer of eggs. But in addition to the whole "where are their brothers?" question, I have the sense that they have given no thought to what they will do when the hens get sick. My suspicions were confirmed when they asked me to look after them for two months this winter; I said I was glad to but would be away for ten days in there. The answer was, "that's OK, they're just chickens, it doesn't matter if they croak." He was kind of joking, but I will be talking to them about that before they go, since neglect would be illegal. The problem is, when we keep animals for our own purposes, use them for something, what choice will we make when inevitably there comes a time when their best interests do not coincide with ours? As in paying for medical care, or providing adequate care while on vacation? All done.