Horrible as it is to watch, this video should be mandatory viewing for anyone who still believes that the egg industry treats chickens humanely. The investigation, conducted by our friends at Mercy for Animals, shows workers at one of the largest egg companies in the U.S. mercilessly abusing chickens who spend their entire lives crammed into filthy cages so small that they can barely move. If this upsets you, there are two things you can do to help. First, you can contact one of the companies that refuses to set humane standards for their suppliers even though the kind of abuse documented here is endemic to the egg industry. But the best thing you can do to help is also the easiest. If you don’t buy eggs, no one has to suffer to make them. Check out this recipe for tofu scramble to get you started.

If you’ve been following this story over the past few days, you’ll know that Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery in South Carolina that runs an egg factory farm to cover its costs, has announced that it will be phasing out its egg production and switching to a new industry following a PETA investigation and subsequent pressure on the monks from our offices. And if you’ve been following my posts on the topic, you’ll know that a number of South Carolina residents who are familiar with the monastery have commented to say that they’re unhappy about this decision, claiming that it was unfair of us to go after the monks because they are decent men who do a lot of good in the community.

The way I see it, however, is that holy men—who should be setting an example for the people who look to them for guidance—need to be particularly accountable for cruel or unethical actions. While we have come to expect that CEOs of large corporations are going to be primarily concerned with their bottom line (and thus less immediately receptive to our concerns about their practices), in a case like this one—where good people have gone astray and are ignoring or failing to understand the fact that they are inflicting terrible suffering—it is all the more important that they be brought up short and asked to consider the damage they’re doing. Being a monk doesn’t mean that you should get off scott free when you’re caught doing something unethical—on the contrary, it means you should be held to a higher standard.

Anyone who has seen our investigation should know that the practices these monks were engaging in (such as confining chickens in cages so small that they had no room to move and denying sick animals veterinary care), as well as the practices that they were directly supporting (their suppliers slice off chicks’ beaks with a hot blade and grind up unwanted male chicks in a macerator), are cruel in the extreme, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s all you really need to know about this case. This factory farm needed to be shut down whether it was run by money-grubbing fat cats or honorable but misguided holy men. Fortunately for us, and for the chickens, it was the latter.

For a more eloquent statement of these ideas, you can read the letter that PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich wrote to the Abbey when this investigation first broke here.

We've just heard the news that the monks at Mepkin Abbey have decided to phase out their egg-production business over the next year and a half following pressure from PETA, including protests of the monastery that are going on today. According to the Associated Press, Mepkin's Father Stan Gumula said late last night that the focus on the monks' practices as a result of PETA's investigation has been too much of a distraction, and that they will be looking for a new industry to help meet their expenses.

PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich points out that South Carolina had the 6th highest peanut production among U.S. states last year (quite how he knows such things, I have no idea), and recommends that the monks go into the booming business of peanut butter packaging, where they can pack the peanuts as tight as they like without any fear of our getting on their case about it. In fact, we might be their first customers. My own vote is more traditional—there's nothing quite like a good Trappist Ale.

Whatever they end up deciding, this is nothing short of a Christmas miracle for the chickens who have suffered for so long at Mepkin Abbey, and we commend the monks for their compassionate decision.

Tomorrow afternoon, PETA members will be demonstrating against the horrific cruelty involved in factory-farm egg production at, of all places, a Trappist Monastery. The perpetrators in question are a group of supposedly peace-loving monks who run an operation at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina that crams 20,000 chickens into tiny wire “battery cages” so small that they barely have room to move. Although Mepkin’s monks don’t grind the male chicks up in macerators themselves—egg farms don’t have any need for male chicks, for obvious reasons—their suppliers do, and this little deal with the devil doesn’t reflect particularly well on them either. In the spirit of Christmas (which is getting ominously close), now’s a really good time for these monks to think about a new way of participating in what they call "the caring cultivation of the Earth and its creatures" that doesn’t involve torturing defenseless animals. I’ll post pictures of the demonstration tomorrow—the protestors will be stationed outside the stores in Charleston and Columbia that sell Mepkin’s eggs—but in the meantime, you can watch footage from our investigation into Mepkin Abbey below.

Total winner, this one. With Easter coming up, a lot of people have eggs on the brain, especially in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, where, according to RXPG News, "Christians across the state consume eggs lavishly after the Sunday Easter mass." Before I go on, I do want to take the opportunity to write that one more time, just in case it never comes up again. Thiruvananthapuram! OK, now that we've got that out of our systems, here's a picture from PETA India's amazing demonstration to draw attention to the fact that chickens used for their eggs are among the most abused animals on the planet. The picture is from a protest that took place this morning. In Thiruvananthapuram.