Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Vegans don't eat eggs because it's an animal product like honey and milk and also because of how animals are treated. However, does eating an egg kill a baby chick that could have had a life? I am a vegetarian and people often argue that the eggs in the grocery store are not fertilized and would never have a life. Is that really true? I know being vegan is the best way of living but does eating eggs really kill something that could have had a life? It would be great to get your opinion.

Harshita S.
Cambridge, Mass.

A. Dearest Harshita,

One foot on the floor.It is not my opinion but rather a fact that if a hen's egg has not been fertilized by a rooster, no embryo or chick will form. In general, an egg sold in a grocery store will not have been fertilized. There is a chance that you are shopping at a small store that carries eggs from small-scale producers, and in this case a rooster might be at the henhouse and the eggs might be fertilized. However, even a fertilized egg is unlikely to result in a life. Let us back up for a moment.

Hens, like women, produce eggs whether or not there is a chance of fertilization. Hens have one ovary, which regularly forms yolks inside its follicular sac. When the yolk is ready, the sac breaks open and releases it into the oviduct. If a hen happens to have a fresh set of sperm from a rooster stored in her infundibulum (the opening of the oviduct), the sperm gets a chance to fertilize the yolk. Whether this occurs or not, the albumen and shell are added in layers to form the complete egg as the yolk continues on a journey through the oviduct. When the egg is completely formed and the hen is ready to push it out, taa daa! Some hens will lay an egg per day.

A fertilized chicken embryo will grow and hatch in about 21 days if the right conditions are met, that is, if it is kept at 80 degrees. Either a hen must brood upon the egg until it hatches, or it must be incubated in a heated machine designed for the purpose. Few breeds of chicken will still brood, as this habit is inconvenient to the egg farmer and has been removed from the genes.

To recap, two things must be present for an egg to have a life: roosters and incubators. It is unusual for either of these conditions to be in place on a modern egg farm. Either the farm is such that tens of thousands of hens are in small cages pumping out eggs, with neither rooster nor free space in site. Or the chickens are roaming around, with perhaps a rooster or several roosters ruling the roost, but the farmer is in the egg-selling business and collects every egg to bring to your store. The only way an egg is a potential life is if that farmer sometimes collects and incubates her own eggs, and your egg happens to be fertilized but was not chosen to hatch out. So you see I am really stretching the possibilities here.

Here's the thing: if you do choose to eat eggs, despite the captivity of the birds, you should be buying eggs from small egg operations. These operations should have freely ranging chickens, and may have roosters. Hence, if you are going to eat eggs, it is better to buy and eat the ones that extremely hypothetically might have resulted in a live chick. Large-scale chicken egg farming is economically, ethically, and environmentally repugnant.

Mildly,
Umbra

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Rod Coronado.“Rod Coronado is not a terrorist,” says Dean Kuipers, author of Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado's War to Save American Wilderness and a longtime writer about the world of eco-activism.

Back in the 1980s and '90s, during Rodney Coronado's radical sabotage campaigns on behalf of animals and the environment, terrorism was generally considered to mean violence against people. Feeling strongly that the loss of any life was wrong and that casualties would harm the movement, Coronado took care to not hurt anyone as he liberated animals and burned down research facilities across the American West. Charged with arson in 1995, Coronado served four years in a medium-security prison and, in August of 2006, was sentenced to eight more months for dismantling a government-owned mountain lion trap.

But over the years, the official definition of terrorism expanded. Through the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, and the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the federal government proclaimed that the tactics the radical animal-rights crowd had been using for years were now a form of "terrorism" and could be prosecuted much more harshly.

In 2007, Coronado found himself standing before a judge once more--though not for property destruction, as his days of burning down buildings were long behind him, but for making a speech. While giving a lecture about his past radical actions, Coronado answered an audience question about how to build an incendiary device out of a plastic jug, and for that, Coronado was charged with a felony and ultimately sent to federal prison for a year and a day. Compared to other collared eco-activists who have been threatened with sentences of up to 20 years under the stricter federal laws, perhaps he got off easy.

Kuipers has been following Coronado's flame-broiled tale of radical action for 17 years and tells the whole story in Operation Bite Back. Kuipers makes it clear that he does not advocate arson or property destruction, but challenges us to consider whether it's reasonable to apply the label of terrorist to someone who releases animals from a lab.

------

Q. How has the shifting definition of "terrorism" changed the environmental movement since the 1980s?

A. I think a lot of the old-timers, the "rednecks for wilderness"--it's sort of where Earth First! began, and Sea Shepherd too in a way--might pin a little bit of that expansion of the term "terrorism" on the late '80s-'90s anarchists who came into the scene. Guys like Rod Coronado. They changed things a lot because the original eco-radical[s], like Greenpeace, were sort of mainstream conservation guys -- they called themselves conservationists. Mostly they were white men who had parties out in the woods and ate steaks and drank whiskey. They were kind of red-blooded Americans, like the heroes of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

And then this whole new contingent, right around 1990, started coming in that was much more about anarchism and identity politics. "What do I believe, and how does that separate me from the rest of the world?" People got into listing their issues. "I not only don't eat animals, but also I am transgendered and I have these piercings that are very important to me." Those kind of issues just drove the old-timers insane, because all of those things started being in the radical journals: "What are we going to do about the homophobia in our movement?" Those are all important discussions, but they didn't have anything to do with saving whales or species problems. That was very disconcerting to the old school of the movement. A lot of them kind of left the movement, because they didn't think that was as important as saving a chunk of wilderness or preserving a specific species.

The use of the word terrorism was always around, even in the '60s, early '70s -- but it was always rhetorical. I think it was Ron Arnold who actually coined the term in 1982: "eco-terrorist." But it was rhetorical at that time because eco-terrorism didn't exist. Unless you killed somebody, you weren't a terrorist. And they hadn't killed anybody, so there wasn't any eco-terrorism.

Changing [terrorism] laws [to encompass environmental activism] really came about because guys like Rod Coronado went further, started using arson. The threat of more violence was sort of there in that movement and I don't think that went over very well with a lot of the conservation movement, and they kind of split off in a lot of ways. So I think that the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front and people who modeled themselves after them have found themselves very isolated from the rest of the movement.

Q. Where do you see the eco-movement going from here?

A. I think that the mainstream approach is totally taking over right now, and they're being successful. Kind of all they had to do is wait out George Bush. I think they have a very sympathetic ear right now. All of the big groups -- NRDC, the Sierra Club -- are very effective right now. They have sympathetic ears in Congress; people like Henry Waxman [chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and cosponsor of the House climate bill] kind of took the key positions that they needed them to take. The deck is loaded now for a lot of stuff to happen.

However, I think that the radical parts of the movement arise because of threat. The global warming question will continue to get bigger, and species extinction and various types of animal abuse, for lack of a better word, are not going to get better. So I think that that kind of action will rise. I don't see that the terrorism laws have ever really stopped it because people -- young people in particular -- just assume they won't get caught. And they're right. They've hardly caught any of those people through the years, [even though there have] been over 1,200 actions and like a billion dollars worth of damage.

I think that the radicalism will rise if the mainstream movement fails to get anything done. I think that's why there's always a radical element to any movement. They're there to step it up and push everybody to a more aggressive position. If they pass some real bullshit legislation about global warming that's basically full of loopholes and everybody can drive a Hummer, the radicalism will step up.

Q. How do people respond when you talk about your work?

A. It depends on who it is. There's such a huge community of people who believe in more radical action -- called direct action -- in solving environmental and animal rights problems that there's a lot of sympathy. But there [are] a lot of people for whom Rodney Coronado is not radical at all and would like to see it go far beyond that.

But that's not the mainstream, and for the most part, mainstream America doesn't really want to get involved in this. They still eat meat and they don't really want to think about factory farms or where their mink coat comes from. Consciousness has definitely gone way, way up, but still it's a huge jump from being conscious about where your food comes from or where your coat comes from to being somebody who knows people who actually go out and do stuff about it, [whether] it's just legislation [or] actually trying to close a place down physically. That's kind of shocking.

I'm sure my family in Michigan would be a little bit appalled: "Another book from Dean that we can't read!"

Q. Have you faced conflicts within the mainstream media because there are stereotypes about environmental activists?

A. I haven't encountered that many serious challenges. You have to dial things back. You have to position them in such a way that the publication feels comfortable that you haven't just completely denied one half of the story from getting its say. Even when we know things are just absolutely for sure -- something like a cancer cluster of people from asbestos -- you've still got to call for a comment from the asbestos department where they say, "No, it's not us." But I do that, so there haven't been too many stories I've brought to people where they've just said, "No, that's too radical for us."

Even in my book, I don't write about Rod Coronado saying that arson is awesome. Arson is not awesome. Arson sucks. It's a thing that people should not do, but it's a tool that he used and I present it pretty matter of fact. I'm sure I will be accused of being an apologist for arson, but that's not my purpose. But if I did write a book about that, I don't think it would be as good, because suddenly there's no reason for any of the farmers to talk to me, the FBI, the police. All those guys have amazing and cool facts that I don't know, and I want all that stuff. As long as we do that, I think the story gets better and people are more open to reading it. I lose less of the audience. You can make more of a difference.

Q. What originally drew you to writing about eco-radicalism?

A. [The actions] happen in great locations. I grew up in the woods in Michigan with a big hunting and fishing family. I was living in New York City when I first started doing this stuff and really sweating it, and having a hard time getting myself out to the Catskills on the weekends to see some trees.

But there are whole protests that last for months happening in redwood groves in Northern California, and people trying to stop roads from being built into central Idaho, which is like God's Country. It's just amazing there -- huge contiguous pieces of roadless wilderness with wolves and moose. Those are the kind of places I like to be in. And on a boat with the Sea Shepherds out in the eastern tropical Pacific to Cocos Island or something -- it's fantastic. I'm not only working on a story, but I'm in the places I would like to see preserved.

Q. Does it water down our legitimate concerns about terrorism to have environmental and animal-rights activists looped into it?

A. Sure. I think it's an insult to the intelligence of the average American, that we can't tell the difference. But of course we can tell the difference! Osama bin Laden goes on the TV on one of his Al Jazeera tapes and says, "We will make the infidels pay," and that's about killing people. The Militant Vegan League -- which is something I'm just making up -- sends out their communiqué saying you have to stop hurting bunnies and you have to stop factory farming where you keep chickens in little cages. It's just a completely unrelated issue in every way -- strategically, philosophically, tactically, in every way. Terrorism is such a strong word that it just allows the same kind of law enforcement tactics to be used to suppress it.

Q. What is the No. 1 message you want to stick with people after reading your book?

A. What we were just talking about. I picked out a particular person--Rod Coronado--to help me tell the story because I want it to be obvious by the time you get to the end that Rod Coronado is not a terrorist. He's done lamentable things, he's burned things and attacked businesses and been very aggressive. But he's never attacked any people. He's an intelligent and respectful person who did things on principle and believed that he was executing the height of nonviolent direct action.

There's a difference between bursting into the Holocaust museum with a gun with the intention of "I'm going to kill a bunch of people to make a statement," and going into someplace late at night and burning their fence and making sure that no people are hurt because you want to make a statement.

We need to take some action to preserve the difference, for all kinds of reasons. So that people don't rot in jail who don't need to for long periods of time. So that we, as a country, are not spiritually affected by this -- I think that there's a price to pay when your country endorses things like torture, and calling people terrorists who are not terrorists plays into that. You're falsely accusing certain sectors of the public of doing something they're not doing.

I also think that it's not that good for us environmentally, that we shouldn't be able to demonize people who are trying to get a message across that many people would recognize as positive.

Catch Dean Kuipers on his book tour or follow him on his blog. You can also see him on BookTV Sunday, July 25.

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The Humane Society of the United States has sued a handful of fur retailers and designers for allegedly misrepresenting some real fur products as fake fur and for improperly labeling other fur products as coming from foxes, rabbits, or raccoons when they're really made from a species of dog in Asia, according to the suit.

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A Penny Saved Is…

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, which will require that egg-laying hens, calves raised for veal, and pregnant pigs be given enough room to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs, and turn around freely. Get the background on this groundbreaking ballot initiative.

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You can bet that if all the animals in America had televisions -- as they do in San Francisco's SPCA shelter -- they'd be tuned in to California's election returns on Nov. 4.

A free-range chicken.

On the ballot is an initiative -- Proposition 2 -- that is as potentially transformational for the treatment of farm animals raised for food in the United States as the presidential vote could be for the nation itself.

Watching closely will be the nation's big meat and egg producers. Because if Californians embrace Prop. 2 -- and scant polling on the initiative suggests it's a runaway hit -- they will be sending a message that goes far beyond the relatively modest changes required by the measure: Consumers really do care about where their food comes from and how it is raised, and they're willing to set limits even if industry isn't.

It's not just another one of those far-out Left Coast things. The Prop. 2 campaign is playing on a mainstream, national stage. Oprah Winfrey devoted a show to the issue of food-animal care and Prop. 2 last week, and the New York Times editorial page voiced support for the proposition.

The changes called for in Prop. 2 are small but significant. The ballot wording says simply that Prop. 2 "requires that calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens, and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely." It would take effect Jan. 1, 2015.

If Prop. 2 passes, its main sponsor, the Humane Society of the United States, expects national reverberations -- and has every intention of helping beat that drum.

Says Paul Shapiro, senior director of the Humane Society's Factory Farming Campaign, "Nobody can ignore the fact that California is the largest agricultural state in the country and it's often a trendsetting state. We envision national reforms coming from passage of Prop. 2. What happened in the veal and pork industry is evidence of this."

Since 2002, veal and pork producers have been hit with tighter regulations in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and Oregon, thanks to new laws outlawing the confinement of veal calves and/or pregnant pigs in crates so small they can't turn around. These laws have added muscle to the growing consumer push for more humanely raised pork and veal, and producers and retailers have started to respond. Smithfield Foods, the nation's biggest pork producer, is phasing out gestation crates, metal cages in which many factory farms keep pregnant pigs. The American Veal Association has urged an end to veal crates. Food retailers from Chipotle to Safeway to Burger King have climbed on board, too.

California's Prop. 2 would prohibit veal and gestation crates as well. But it's really all about eggs. Prop. 2 takes square aim at the commodified egg industry's practice of crowding laying hens into small wire cages, stacked to the rafters, in the name of efficiency and profits.

Prop. 2 would not require egg producers to stop caging hens. But they would have to provide enough space in the cages for the hens to do the things that hens naturally do, as defined by the initiative.

The campaign against Prop. 2 says that the measure, however well-intentioned, will be bad for both animals and humans, and could push California egg producers to Mexico, beyond the reach of American food-safety laws.

Caged hens.

Photo: Compassion Over Killing

The industry says cages protect hens from disease and from their tendency to fight. The space standard for a white leghorn is 67 square inches, according to Nancy Reimers, a poultry-industry veterinarian who works for the "No on Prop. 2" campaign. That's about two-thirds the size of a sheet of printer paper.

Often, though, so many hens are jammed into battery cages that they can't lay down, let alone flap their wings -- if there's room for them to get their feet on the ground at all. (I've never seen this firsthand, but documentary film footage of abuses is widely available online. The latest, shot in August and September, shows carnage inside a facility run by Norco, one of California's big egg producers. The anti-2 campaign called it "dubious and cynical" pro-2 propaganda.)

The amount of money involved -- more than $6 million on the yes side, more than $5 million for no -- tells you there are more than a few omelettes at stake in the Prop. 2 campaign.

The Humane Society has put up more than half the yes campaign's war chest, with the rest coming from other animal-welfare groups and a colorful list of individuals, including financier T. Boone Pickens and his wife, Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, and cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, whose "Mutts" comic strip featured a Prop. 2 story line this month.

Large egg producers from all over the country have poured money into the anti-2 campaign. Among them are Norco, Moark, and Demler, among California's biggest players, plus producers in Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and many other states. Farm bureau federations from California, Kansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Florida have contributed too.

The names of the competing sides tell you exactly how the debate is being framed: It's Californians for Humane Farms against Californians for SAFE Food.

Both sides have planted campaign signs on the food-safety lawn, and can produce jousting scientific studies to buttress their claims, but the no side is relying more heavily on safety arguments.

According to opponents, Prop. 2 "jeopardizes our food safety and public health" because eggs are more likely to carry diseases like salmonella if the hens' carefully calibrated environment is changed. Reimers also says Prop. 2 would kill California's egg industry, and that would leave Californians dependent on eggs from states or countries that lack California's food-safety regulations.

Current space allocations for hens, says Reimers, are "based on the best science."

The yes side points to its own sets of data showing lower rates of salmonella and other bugs that can hurt humans when hens have more space. And it has the support of a number of influential consumer and food-safety groups, including the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the Consumer Federation of America.

As far as hen health goes, the no side argues that the hens are safer and more secure separated into small social groups in cages. The yes side has only to show photos of tiny battery cages clogged with feces to make its case that the hens aren't happy.

The California Veterinary Medical Association, plus 700 individual California vets, support Prop. 2. But nationally, the picture flips: the American Veterinary Medical Association, while officially neutral, says Prop. 2 is "primarily based on emotion" and could have "unintended negative consequences" for hen and human health.

Opponents of Prop. 2 say it would double egg prices. Proponents say it would raise the price of an egg by only a penny. But the threat of higher prices was enough to win the California NAACP over to the no side.

A July 2008 study from the Agricultural Issues Center of the University of California at Davis projects that Prop. 2 would cause "little, if any, cost increase" for consumers, in large part because it would lead to more eggs coming from out of state. That would deal a lethal blow to California's $330 million egg industry within five years, the study concluded. Half the eggs consumed in California already come from out of state.

Jennifer Fearing, chief economist for the Humane Society of the United States and Prop. 2 campaign manager, says there's no way the U.S. egg industry really believes the measure would doom California's egg producers. If it did, out-of-state egg producers wouldn't be flooding the no campaign with contributions, she says, because they would only have market share to gain.

"They are worried that this is nailing down the principle that all animals including those raised for food deserve humane treatment," she says.

The yes side also contends that the U.C.-Davis report ignores the economic upsides of Prop. 2 -- that it would help small, family farmers and likely encourage production of cage-free eggs. The study fails to take into account California's growing market for cage-free eggs, Fearing says, and Prop. 2 could bring prices for them more in line with conventional eggs.

That may be one reason some small producers who have carved a profitable cage-free niche out of the commodity egg market oppose Prop. 2, Fearing says.

One cage-free producer displays a "Californians for SAFE Food" banner on its stall at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, arguably one of the nation's most rarified bastions of local, sustainable, and humanely raised food. Its owner did not return calls asking why, but he's been quoted as saying that Prop. 2 would kill his business.

Demand for cage-free eggs has already pushed the food industry to start adopting more humane practices when it comes to laying hens. Whole Foods Markets refuses to sell eggs from caged hens, and Safeway and Burger King have taken incremental steps toward selling or using more cage-free eggs.

However the economics play out, it seems likely that come Nov. 4, powerful winds of change will be blowing out of the West and into henhouses across the nation. Voters like Prop. 2, according to a poll conducted by four California TV stations in late September. It showed strong support among likely voters, 72-10 with 17 percent undecided -- though that was before late-campaign ad blitzes for both sides.

Peter Singer, the animal rightist and Princeton professor, told me by email that Prop. 2 is "enormously important -- the most important popular vote for animals in the history of the United States, I'd say."

"Yes, it's a small step, but factory farming isn't small -- it affects billions of animals each year, in the U.S. alone," Singer wrote. "If California follows Arizona and Florida in voting against factory farming, it will be impossible to deny that the American public, given a chance to express their views, is against the close confinement of animals, which has been a standard feature of U.S. animal production for the past 50 years. And that will send a signal to producers that they had better change their ways, or they will be put out of business."

Michael Pollan, the U.C.-Berkeley journalism professor whose book The Omnivore's Dilemma propelled him to leadership of the movement to reform the U.S. food industry, says he signed the petition to get Prop. 2 on the ballot, though he does expect it to have unintended consequences, perhaps even negative ones for California egg producers.

He adds, "My hope is that, as on so many issues, California will push the rest of the country forward, and Prop. 2's passage will push companies like McDonald's to change their standards (they're on the precipice already, I'm told) and California's position will become the de facto national position. So whatever messiness we may inherit here, California will, when the history of these brutal practices is written, look visionary."

Yes on Prop. 2:

No on Prop. 2:

Jennifer Fearing, chief economist for the Humane Society of the United States, is serving as the Prop. 2 campaign manager. She discussed the initiative earlier this year with Grist's Tom Philpott.

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