'Big Bird’s Betrayal
By Casey
September 29, 2009

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No sunny days to sweep the clouds away for these hens

Times are tough for the egg industry. The Food and Drug Administration is
implementing costly regulationsin an effort to keep consumers from getting sick.
U.S. per capita consumption has been declining since 2005. More and more
states are considering legislation to ban cruel battery cages in the wake of a
landmark ballot initiative last year in California. And, worst of all, animal
advocates keep exposing them for their undeniably cruel treatment of animals.
It’s hard to say what Americans find more disgusting, the mutilation of day-old
chicks recently exposed in the media or leaving dead hens to rot inside their
filthy cages with surviving cagemates.

Since the egg industry can’t stop abusing animals, its only alternative is to
launch a new marketing campaign aimed at giving it a more warm and fuzzy
image. You’ve heard of greenwashing? Well, meet warm-fuzzy-washing.
Earlier this month, the American Egg Board (AEB) launched its “Good Egg
Project,” which invites people to take a pledge to “Eat good. Do good
everyday.” For every person that takes this nebulous pledge, the AEB will
donate one egg to food pantries, up to a million eggs. Of course, the egg
industry extorts more than 90 billion eggs from miserable caged hens every
year. If you put those eggs in cartons laid end to end, they would circle the
Earth’s equator 57 times! In contrast one million eggs in cartons laid end to
end wouldn’t even get you from Brooklyn to Yonkers.

But the warm-fuzzy-washing doesn’t stop there. To make things even more
repugnant, they are partnering up with the producers of “Sesame Street,”
helping to underwrite the show’s 40th season in exchange for photo ops with
Cookie Monster and, undoubtedly, plenty of pro-egg messages that will be
spoon-fed to millions of hapless youngsters. With McDonald’salready in the
show’s stable of corporate sponsors, I guess it must have seemed like a
good fit. Of course, “Sesame Street” wouldn’t dare tell kids the truth about
eggs or the tortured lives of farm animals. Everyone knows that honesty is the
best policy,except when talking to children, in which case you should just
keep your mouth shut and take that big fat corporate check to the bank.

What’s an animal activist to do? Here are some suggestions:

*Tell the folks at “Sesame Street” what you think of their new sponsor.
*Give children in your life a real lesson in compassion by reading to them from
an animal friendly book, like Ruby Roth’s That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals.
We know reading to kids does far more for their development (and yours)
than plopping them down in front of a television anyway.
*If you’re an educator, consider adding ourCultivating Compassion series to
your curriculum.
*Join our Advocacy Campaign Team as we fight to ban battery cages and
spread the vegan message.
*Learn about the joys of egg-free cookery during the Vegan Month of Food
(Vegan MoFo), also known as October.

"Dank 110100100" <dank...@rocketmail.com> wrote
On Sep 29, 1:30 pm, "O.pearl" <priv...@iol.ie> wrote:

I hate Oprah and use her to filter out all the stupid and idiotic
ideas in the world.  Oprah also endorsed Barack Obama and opposed
Prop. 8, inspiring me to vote the opposite.

As for eggs, I love them and the only thing that could get me to stop
eating them is if Oprah promoted them as the latest health food on her
stupid show.
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