At UO, new eggs buy freedom.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

The chicken liberation front landed squarely in Eugene on Saturday when advocates pushed University of Oregon students to pay a 20 percent premium on their dining hall omelettes - all in the name of freeing chickens from cage-bound lives.

The dorm-based Fire n' Spice food service began this term offering students a $1 upgrade for meals made with eggs from a speciality supplier that allows chickens room to roam, preen and do other chickenlike things.

They deserve better lives, said Monica Kerslake, a second-year law student and founder of the Student Animal Defense Fund. The group hopes to encourage students to opt for the more expensive eggs.

"All beings on this Earth have feelings, feel pain and suffer," she said. "Chickens are highly intelligent animals and they don't want to suffer or feel pain or die - just as much as we don't want to."

Similar sentiments drove the Washington-based Burgerville chain to announce last week that all its eggs would now come from cage-free chickens. Other businesses, such as Unilever's Ben & Jerry's brand ice cream and Trader Joe's markets, also have switched to cage-free eggs.

Kerslake started her UO campaign last year. About 80 U.S. universities already had converted to cage-free eggs in on-campus eateries, and she figured the UO would follow suit.

Kerslake and an associate, Carrie Freeman, who belongs to Students for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said they are concentrating on educating fellow students who don't know about deplorable conditions on factory farms, where hens are kept.

"People have a naive belief it's `Old MacDonald's Farm,' ' Freeman said.

The cages are stacked. The wire cuts into the chickens' feet. So many bodies are in a cage, the birds can't flap their wings, according to humane society literature. Factory workers have to wear face masks because there is so much ammonia in the air.

Producers do whatever they must to get the most production out of each hen, including starving them to spur laying during their fallow periods, Freeman said.

"It's really about putting the least amount of energy into them and getting the most out," she said, adding that when the hens are done laying they're ground up in soup or dog food.

The average U.S. resident eats 59 pounds of chicken and 256 eggs each year, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.

When people start thinking about the animals, they'll be less likely to want to eat them, the activists said.

Their leaflets hammer home the point: "What if you had to spend 2 years in a windowless dorm room with 15 other people suspended over a toilet?" Conventional farmers would shudder if they heard from the freshman shuffling to Fire n' Spice on Saturday. They were happy to chip in for the new eggs, especially when they were paying with their parent-funded dining hall card.

"It's worth it to me for chickens to live a little better," said Josh Mehdikhan, who's majoring in psychology.

He said society tends to the treatment of dogs and cats. "Does a chicken not deserve equal rights?" he said.

Springing for cage-free eggs sends a message for producers to use the healthiest, not just the cheapest, methods, he said.

Eric Ward, a business major, said he pays the cage-free egg tax because "it seems like a nice thing to do."

But Joseph Vandehey, a mathematics major, said he wants to know what, exactly, are the benefits of buying the pricier eggs, what the cost-effectiveness is of the program. He wondered, "Why haven't we done it before?"

"One of the things about being a mathematician - you can be quite skeptical of things," he said.