Free range eggs

I yield to no-one in my consideration for baby calves: they're cute, they have big brown eyes; therefore I don't eat veal. But that's as far as I go in my concern for farm animals. I don't want them to suffer needlessly, of course. But I eat them, and I plan to continue eating them as long as I can afford to.

So when I saw that eggs from free-range chickens were $3 more than plain eggs from--what must I call them, captive chickens?--I decided to go for the latter. Only there weren't any. I asked them to look in the back of the store and see if there were any stashed there. There weren't. So I didn't buy eggs yesterday.

It's really a stretch for me to care about the welfare and personal life of a chicken. Again, I don't want them to suffer. But what's suffering to a chicken? We're not talking the Einstein of the barnyard here. When not in captivity all they do is run around aimlessly, scratch in the ground and make stupid noises. Maybe the average hen would prefer to sit on her duff and get fed three squares a day without going to the trouble of ranging freely looking for grub. Who knows? The chickens aren't talking.