Of Mice and Men and Chickens

It isn't a conspiracy if it's a business plan. Never forget that.

Two things have happened in the past couple of weeks.

1. Eggs have been declared really, really bad for you after years of being the PERFECT food.

2. People all over the net have been reporting their hens are going broody.

The first one you have probably read all the articles about and decided not to buy that dozen of eggs on your next trip to the grocery.

Where the second one is concerned, you are probably saying, "what the Hell is broody?"

Broody is when a hen gets 'depressed' and stops laying.

So, let me give you a possible scenario and see if it makes sense to you.

Before the advent of something called Laying Mash, hens only went broody when they were just starting to lay and didn't have the hang of things or when they got older and were winding down their reproductive cycle. My relatives ate at least two eggs a day not counting what they got in things like cookies, cakes and various dinner products. They lived well into their late 80's when 60's was considered old and then, they died of natural causes, not heart attacks.

Then came Laying Mash. Laying Mash is a commercially prepared chicken food fed to hens that contains hormones to cause the hen to lay one or more eggs per day unlike her natural cycle which can be an egg every two to three days. Hens which laid daily were highly prized and bred for more chickens.

Now, when you expose an animal or human to a hormone from the time it is an egg and its grandparents and generations before it are exposed to this hormone, the receptors in the brain become overloaded and shut down. They are no longer sensitive to the hormone and it takes more and more hormone to turn them on or off. My guess is we are now sliding down the other side of the bell curve and these chickens no longer have any sensitivity to the hormone that causes them to lay eggs.

What do you do when you have spent years building a huge audience for eggs and suddenly your hens are not laying eggs? Do you admit you have been feeding them toxic amounts of hormones that by-the-way might be affecting you, too? Or, do you pay a hospital or university to produce a study showing how bad eggs are so no one notices the reduction in stock because they aren't buying them anyway?

Well, I'll let you decide. Which option do you think Corporate America would take?