The Dilemma of the Eggs

   I eat eggs when our chickens are laying. Eggs are the only animal product I still eat. I don't know what happens to eggs on sanctuary farms. I have written to several sites but have never received a response. I mean, as a transitioning vegan is it more ethical to throw them out or to eat them? If the eggs were fertile they could produce more chickens of course, but when there is no rooster around, there are eggs to contend with. In the spring there are lots of eggs.
  We have six chickens in our little flock. Princess is the oldest at just under 8 years old. She is an Australorp with lovely black feathers mixed with green and blue. She was part of our first flock of three Australorps. Her sisters died; first Queenie then two years later Persephone. After Queenie died we got April, Rosie and Jackie because we thought that Princess and Persephone would live about the same length of time. As it was, Queenie died young and we were never sure why. She just stopped running one day, sat down abruptly then fell over dead. It was very sad.
   We took our two youngest grandchildren with us to pick out some new friends. They got to name the hens they chose. Rosie was picked because she was BIG. She is a Black Sex Link with black feathers tinged with red. She has always been a little bossy. Jackie was picked because she was white and there were not many who were white. She is a Leghorn and lays lots of white eggs. I read up on Leghorns and one commentary said that Leghorns were flighty. I thought that meant nervous until she began flying up into the trees and over fences. She doesn't do that so much anymore, seems to be more content to stay closer to the ground. I have some interesting pictures of her to remember that stage, however, like the one below that I took from inside the house. It seemed to us that she had flown up into the tree in order to see what we were doing inside.

   My husband gave April her name because it was the first of April when the three girls came home with us. April is very independent. She is a Plymouth Rock and has white and black feathers. For a while we had five chickens since it was another two years before Persephone died. She began to  lag behind the others and we made sure she got her share of food even when she would sit in the coop for long hours alone while the others were out running around in the yard. It was during a particularly cold spell that she finally gave up living. We buried her near her sister under a large Camellia Bush. Rosie, Jackie and April are now four years old and Princess is still going strong.
   A year ago we were given two more young hens. Penney, who is a Rhode Island Red, is named for the copper color of her feathers which is also reflected in the color of her eggs. Susie is an Ameraucana whose feathers are black with grey streaks. I named her after the friend who gave her to us. Susie lays light blue eggs which are very distinctive.
   I used to think that chickens lived only a couple of years, which of course is true if they are born into the captivity of an egg farm. On egg farms chickens are forced to lay eggs day after day with the use of artificial lighting. Their beaks are clipped and if they have any room to move around at least one of their wings is clipped to keep them from flying. If they are kept in a tiny cage as most enslaved hens are, then they don't need their wings clipped but they never ever get a chance to walk either. Those chickens are lucky to live for 18 months before ending up as someone's chicken soup.
  Our girls call the shots regarding egg laying. We don't use any artificial light so we have come to expect eggs seasonally. I was surprised to discover that chickens don't lay eggs regularly around the year, but how could I know that when I bought eggs in stores that had them aplenty year round? I was surprised this year when we didn't see any eggs at all from Penney over the darkest days of winter. Since she is young, laying a couple of eggs a week would have been more normal. But we didn't see any at all. My husband and I did go out and look for a secret nest periodically - the girls do that from time to time - but we couldn't find any until quite recently.
  I was poking around in the woodshed and heard some soft clucking and after some minutes of trying to determine where the clucking was coming from I discovered Penney underneath the board that was keeping the stacked wood off of the ground. Not wanting to disturb her, I waited until much later to check and found not one nest but two, her current one and an older abandoned one with no more room to sit. There were a total of 31 eggs. Eggs do last a long time outside unless they are washed. Then they lose their protective coating and must be refrigerated. Eggs that come from factory farms are sometimes refrigerated for months before they get to the store! But eventually, without refrigeration, the eggs do go bad. You can check them by putting them in a pan of water. IF they are good, they DO NOT float. If they are turning bad they stand on end and eventually start floating.
  We had 19 eggs that were beginning to float! They were in a basket on the table in the kitchen for a couple of days while I tried to think what to do with them. There were too many to put in the compost and we don't have regular garbage service. Finally, I decided to find a place inside one of the fenced vegetable gardens where I could dig a hole and bury them. Anyway that's the second part of the dilemma of the eggs. The first part; is it ethical to eat them and if not, what to do with them?  The second is, how to dispose of rotten eggs?
   Any readers out there with ideas or comments, PLEASE let me know.