Why don't vegans eat backyard eggs?

Created on: 01.09.2025
Last edited on: 01.09.2025

First off: Backyard chickens are chickens that have been rescued or bought by private individuals. These chickens live under human care to produce and provide eggs, or as pets.

Most people probably share our view that chick shredding and similar practices in the conventional egg industry are immoral. But these don't happen with backyard chickens, you might be thinking now. In that case, isn't it perfectly fine to eat their eggs too?

The short answer: No!

First of all, good treatment can never justify abuse. Imagine we kept humans free-range in beautiful surroundings to take away their periods or anything else. Suddenly that doesn't sound so okay anymore, does it? And there are several more points that speak against using animals this way:

  • The origin of the chickens: By buying chickens from the egg industry, e.g. from a farmer or breeder, people also financially support the industry behind it. The practices carried out there include killing male chicks shortly after they hatch, or killing laying hens as soon as they are no longer considered profitable. Even for the backyard, people will probably only buy (egg-laying) hens, which means the male chicks are once again left over as “waste” and destroyed.
    On top of that, the principle of supply and demand means that chickens keep being bred. Buying chickens therefore often fuels an existing slave market.
    Street interview in Berlin with the TV tower in the background. The image shows the question whether you can eat eggs from chickens you keep as pets
  • Overbreeding: Laying hens are usually severely overbred. As a result, they lay around 300 eggs per year on average instead of the usual 10-15. Humans have deliberately increased their laying rate thirtyfold. This process wears the animals out massively: if you have a uterus, you can surely imagine how exhausting it would be to have your period every day. Most laying hens are bred for suffering, which means their mere existence is already an unimaginable strain.
    On top of that, these chickens often suffer from nutrient deficiencies and the resulting diseases such as osteoporosis (bones becoming brittle through calcium loss). Egg binding is also common: an egg gets stuck in the cloaca and blocks it, which usually leads to death under severe suffering. Backyard chickens can be affected by this too.
    This cruel breeding must be prevented first and foremost by not buying animals that come from it and thereby creating demand for more breeding. With rescued chickens, you can feed their eggs back to them to replace at least part of the lost nutrients. With rescued laying hens, it can also help to free them from the high laying rate with hormones if needed.


Inflamed cloaca

  • Suppression of natural behaviour: Hens have the innate instinct to brood their eggs. When the eggs are taken away, they cannot live out this primal instinct and the behaviour that goes with it. Because most people see the animals as resources rather than individuals, their needs often fall dramatically by the wayside in backyard keeping too.

  • A critical look at the chickens as individuals: What is the intention behind keeping backyard chickens? If it is mainly about eating their eggs, the animals are degraded from companions to resources. As a result, some chicken keepers find it normal to kill the animals if they eat their own eggs, no longer lay enough eggs, or get sick.
    But the value of chickens we adopt should never depend on how useful they are to us. Just imagine someone adopts a dog and, if it doesn't cuddle the way the human wants, it simply gets bumped off. You surely find that cruel too, right? In the same way, adopting chickens should not be tied to the condition that they are useful. Domestic chickens must not be our slaves either, abused for the human claim of ownership!

Street interview in front of a residential building. The image shows the question “Eating eggs from your own chickens?” (in German)
Street interview: Raffaela talking to a passer-by. The image shows the question “Are eggs from your own chickens okay?” (in German)

 

What do vegans eat instead of eggs?

If you live vegan and therefore avoid animal products, you still get to enjoy the taste: replacing eggs with vegan options is easier than ever today. You can make a healthy, protein-rich vegan egg substitute from tofu, chickpea flour or innovative plant-based egg alternatives from the supermarket, for example. Here are Raffaela’s favourite recipes for vegan eggs:

🍳🌱 Vegan scrambled eggs by Die Milde Veganerin
🥚🌱 Vegan omelette by Die Milde Veganerin

 

Conclusion

Chickens are not resources, and their eggs are not commodities! That is why vegans don’t eat eggs, not even when they come from a seemingly cute backyard. Rescuing chickens is, as with pets in general, a noble thing, provided it happens with the intention of giving them the most contented and long life possible that takes their interests into account. By taking their eggs away from chickens, you always make potential compromises regarding their interests, and that is unjust.

Veganism is about looking at non-human animals differently than we probably learned to: they are here with us, not for us. They are sentient beings with their own interests, and the value of their lives exists independently of their usefulness to us humans. The chick shredder did not appear overnight. Our ancestors discovered that they could use chicken eggs and wanted to do so on an ever larger scale. That is how chickens became mere production sites in the eyes of humans, and this is exactly what we must consistently break with!

➡️ Share our answer: