What I Didn’t Know About the Egg Industry Horrified Me

Every spring, I’d eagerly await my special package — a box that arrived peeping. Inside were just-hatched chicks, still egg-shaped and covered in down. I would raise the chicks in my home office. During our first month together, there was always a chick or two in my sweater, on my shoulder or perching atop my head. They considered me their mother. Later, when they moved outside to a coop, they ranged freely over the eight acres my husband and I own in rural New Hampshire. Whenever they caught sight of me, they would greet me as if I were a...