Aborting chicks is better than killing them post-birth, but even so, egg-laying birds will still eventually be killed off and turned into meat/byproducts -- and the cruelty-free environments don't scale. Chickens just aren't really built to lay that many eggs, and ultimately there doesn't seem to be any way to optimize industry-level farming to care about animal health/happiness. At best we get much more expensive products that appeal to a minority of the market. Especially when you realize that a nontrivial percentage of the eggs you eat are coming from restaurants and as ingredients in pre-made foods, where there's basically no current market pressure to ethically source those materials.
In theory there could be a version of the egg industry that avoided most of these problems (yes, I know some vegans would view that as non-consensual exploitation anyway) but regardless, practice is still a long, long ways away from theory.
I know people like to believe that you can just get cruelty free eggs that solve all of these problems, and you can certainly do a lot better than just buying the cheapest brand -- and I'm not going to shame people, doing better is a good goal to have. A lot of food, even vegan food, has problematic elements that you can dig up, we're all just trying to do a bit better than the default and to be more ethical than we otherwise would be.
But while it would be really convenient if the modern egg industry was ethical, it's just very hard to argue that point.
OTOH if you happen to live in a house with a decent sized garden it's really nice to get chickens. You will treat them with cooking waste (and cereals and ground seashell) and they give you deep orange eggs. Chances are you can save to-be-killed chicken for free, some local farmer gave us a dozen (they're not productive enough for exploitation but still can have a healthy life). IMO the important thing (as always) is DIY: understand how it's done, do it right. The degeneracy of industry for a big part a byproduct of insane scale.
Aborting chicks is better than killing them post-birth, but even so, egg-laying birds will still eventually be killed off and turned into meat/byproducts -- and the cruelty-free environments don't scale. Chickens just aren't really built to lay that many eggs, and ultimately there doesn't seem to be any way to optimize industry-level farming to care about animal health/happiness. At best we get much more expensive products that appeal to a minority of the market. Especially when you realize that a nontrivial percentage of the eggs you eat are coming from restaurants and as ingredients in pre-made foods, where there's basically no current market pressure to ethically source those materials.
In theory there could be a version of the egg industry that avoided most of these problems (yes, I know some vegans would view that as non-consensual exploitation anyway) but regardless, practice is still a long, long ways away from theory.
I know people like to believe that you can just get cruelty free eggs that solve all of these problems, and you can certainly do a lot better than just buying the cheapest brand -- and I'm not going to shame people, doing better is a good goal to have. A lot of food, even vegan food, has problematic elements that you can dig up, we're all just trying to do a bit better than the default and to be more ethical than we otherwise would be.
But while it would be really convenient if the modern egg industry was ethical, it's just very hard to argue that point.