What's wrong with eggs? The hens aren't killed.
Short answer: Eggs kill twice. Male chicks are useless to the egg trade, so billions are gassed or shredded at a day old, and the hens are slaughtered at ~72 weeks, a fraction of their natural life.
Male chicks of laying breeds don't lay eggs and grow too slowly for meat, so they are killed within a day of hatching, by maceration (live shredding) or gassing. Global estimates run to around 6-7 billion a year.
Industry estimates via CIWF (2023) and RSPCA
The objection
“Eggs are the guilt-free option. You take what the hen produces anyway, nobody has to die for an omelette.”
The answer
Eggs carry a death the carton never mentions. Hatch a batch of laying-breed chicks and half come out male. Males don’t lay, and laying breeds grow too slowly to be worth raising for meat, so they are worthless to the trade and killed within a day of hatching. The standard methods are maceration, being dropped alive into a high-speed grinder, or gassing [1][2]. Globally this comes to an estimated 6 to 7 billion male chicks a year [1]. Every laying hen alive had a brother who was shredded on day one.
The hen herself isn’t spared, only deferred. A chicken can live five to eight years [3]. A commercial layer is worked through her most productive stretch and then, when output and shell quality drop, she is classed as “spent” and sent to slaughter at around 72 weeks, under a year and a half [3]. She isn’t retired. She’s replaced.
The life in between is the cage. Even “enriched” cages, the legal standard across much of Europe after the battery ban, give each hen little more than the space of an A4 sheet, with a perch and a nest box bolted into an environment she still can’t stretch, dustbathe or roam in properly.
So the premise is wrong twice over. The hen is killed, simply later than the broiler, and to get her the industry kills her brother first. “Nobody has to die for an omelette” is precisely backwards.