Some Observations...(all are welcomed)

[PvK]

Oh no, North Americans with their wide open spaces would never maximize their profit/cost ratios by doing tremendous things to chickens. Certainly no human would sear off a chicken beak - what reason would there be for that?

. . .

Well, no reason, until they get crammed together so that they start fighting and cannibalizing each other.

"Most Americans know little about how their eggs are produced. They don't know that American egg-producers typically keep their hens in bare wire cages, often crammed eight or nine hens to a cage so small that they never have room to stretch even one wing, let alone both. The space allocated per hen, in fact, is even less than broiler chickens get, ranging from 48 to 72 square inches. Even the higher of these figures is less than the size of a standard American sheet of typing paper. In such crowded conditions, stressed hens tend to peck each other -- and the sharp beak of a hen can be a lethal weapon when used relentlessly against weaker birds unable to escape. To prevent this, producers routinely sear off the ends of the hens' sensitive beaks with a hot blade -- without an anesthetic."

excerpt from The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason

PvK