The Value of Eggs

Being vegan means not eating any foods from animals as well as not eating animals.
There is controversy over honey but the majority of vegans believe that honey is not okay to consume as well.
My personal stance on eggs is that they are okay to eat if you have your own chickens and you know eggsactly (haha! exactly...get it?) how they are treated.
Which I do because my grandmother has a chicken coop.
And it is interesting to get a first hand look at how they are raised and how they interact with the world around them.
She has 20 chickens and never clipped their wings and treats them as pets.  She has her favorites and they seem to favor her too.  She feeds them chard that she grows from the garden as a treat just for them.  And even table scraps left over from dinner.   Their coop is heated in the winter and they all just hang out all day long enjoying life.
They are food producing pets and she does not plan to kill them to make into dinner once they stop laying eggs.
And they even protect the family from snakes as they have killed several copper heads over the summer!
What a better symbiotic relationship! Two species working together, human and chicken.

I feel no guilt eating these eggs.

Because if the family does not remove the eggs then the chickens try to eat them.  Which causes a mess in the coop.  Eggs are messy to clean up.

However, eggs from the store cause me a few issues.  The female chickens are not allowed to walk around and enjoy life.  They do not get to enjoy life.  They are killed after their egg baring time is over.
It is common knowledge that as chicks are sorted for egg laying, the male chicks are basically sorted and sent to their deaths and blended alive.

It is a cruel practice.  Mass production of food has created a cruel and inhumane environment for other living creatures.
If humans are so advanced then it is time to move past hurting any other sentient being for food.   If my grandmother chose to not have chickens anymore then I would not eat eggs anymore.  And I refuse to support eggs from the supermarket at all.

The grey area in this, are locally produced eggs.
I would need to see how the chickens are treated before I could pass judgment on if I would want to eat the eggs.  Some people are no better than a large commercial farm and treat the chickens as a commodity not a life.  Others are just people over run with eggs that they cannot get rid of.  This is an area that leaves wiggle room for people who want to eat eggs and have the eggs from humanely treated chickens.
A small amount of research is going to go a long way.

Create your own value system when it comes to eggs.