In the world we live in now, the worst possible thing to be is a hen. A hen, you see, never feels a sense of safety. It is not safe as an egg; an unborn child because we, wonderful humans need our daily boost of protein.

It is not even protected as a chick because if by some miracle it escapes the terrors of being a factory animal and if it is not raised to be slaughtered, this young unsuspecting child is dyed in appealing colours which surely contain countless toxins, and is brought to a marketplace where it spends its very short life waiting to be bought by someone eager to escape their children’s whiny cries of "I want a baby chick!"

We are familiar with how this young animal spends the remainder of its remorseful life. Sure, a farm hen might have it a bit easier, living a happy life till the time it’s slaughtered but who keeps farm hens anymore?

In these modern times, there are broiler chickens and battery cage hens -- both of them have equally miserable lives. A broiler chicken, for example, spends her short life (7 weeks) sharing a cramped cage with several others like herself in highly unhygienic conditions until the fateful day she is killed. Till then she makes use of her life doing nothing. But then again, how could she? Broiler chickens barely have room to lift their wings.

At seven weeks, the hen is not fully matured, so to make it seem as though she is, they are injected with growing hormones so that they develop faster.

This is incredibly inhumane because not only are you inflicting a lot of misery upon the hen, you are also killing a premature.

The same goes for a battery cage hen. This type of factory animal is used in the egg industry. She has an equally terrifying life.

I hope you noticed how I have been referring to the hen as a ‘she’. This is because only the female specimen is used in this ‘dirty’ work.

After birth, the genders of the baby chickens are checked and the males and females are separated. The males are directly discarded off in unimaginable ways. In his book, Animal Liberation, Peter Singer states: "Some companies gas the little birds, but often they are dumped alive into a plastic sack and allowed to suffocate under the weight of other chicks dumped on top of them. Others are ground up, while still alive, to be turned into feed for their sisters."

After reading this, you should be wondering who has it worse -- the females or the males? Well, in truth, the females suffer more than the males because after they have been separated, the hens are taken to indoor sheds and placed inside cages with more than one hen in each.

These hens are extremely uncomfortable as the cages have sloping wire floors which may make it easier for eggs to roll to the front of the cage where they can be retrieved easily but makes it extremely hard for them to stand properly.

After the hen stops laying, it is killed, just as expected. This also tells us that whatever equipment is used during these processes is made only for our convenience and that the animal’s safety does not matter.

In fact, the only time factory owners actually care about the hens’ safety is when they don’t want any signs of bruises or faults in their animals for the fear that no one will buy their meat.

So, these ‘sin-less’ animals go through all this pain and anguish just so they can be turned into soups and frozen dinners. For you, they are made to suffer a lot just so you can be fed. Not that you need to be fed processed food that contains a lot of preservatives and is really unhealthy. Do you not think it will be better if we stopped digesting such food not only because the food, when it was alive, went through so much torture, but also because this is very unwholesome and contains a lot of things which it should not and is slowly killing us.

I hope that someday, we will step out of our cocoons of oblivion and realise that what we do, can and will hurt other species of the environment.