Eggs?

if your concern is about cruelty/ treatment of chickens, you could:

find out if they purchase and keep as many male chicks as female. if not, they're contributing to the grinding, gasing, or suphocating of newborn male chicks (something suppliers do).

find out if they kill/sell the chickens for meat when they hit a certain age, or when their egg production/quality declines... or if they keep them around as pets until they die of old age.

find out if the chickens get to run free in sunshine and grass, pecking worms and rooting about in earth... or if they live in a cage or barn.

then decide how you feel.

> would they be OK to eat

That's your choice. I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian, so for me they'd be fine to eat. If you'd like to be vegan, they aren't.

[Groundhog Day]

Phil: Do you ever have deja vu Mrs. Lancaster?

Mrs. Lancaster: I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen.

[/Groundhog Day]

Another thing to consider would be the size of the flock; chickens can only recognize around 100 other members of the flock, if there are more birds than that, proper pecking orders can't be formed, cause the hens to become stressed and fights can often break out. To lessen the number of fights part of the hen's beak, a very important sensory organ, is seared off.

Also, if they keep the hens and ***** together, the eggs could have been fertilized.

Only you can decide whether you're ok with it or not.

yeah, I agree with everyone else. Make sure your not contributing to the evilness of Factory Farming if thats what your concern is. Which I hope it is. Ask your neghboor to take a tour of every where the chickens stay. If your comfortable with their living conditions Id say you found a loop hole.

Eggs are a product of chicken menstruation. Why would you want to eat an egg?

Ask questions, and decide whether you are comfortable eating the eggs.

ask them where they got the birds from. if they say a hatchery, a feed store, or through the mail, then they came from a place where male birds were killed as infants. also, ask what happens to the birds when they're not laying enough anymore. walking the grounds and seeing the conditions the chickens are in today *is* important, but it doesn't begin to tell you what hand this farm may play in supporting the killing of birds. asking those questions will give you more information about that...