Cage-free eggs are worse for the climate. Does it matter?

Egg-laying hens in a typical battery cage facility. | Getty Images Popular conceptions of farming tend to associate good animal welfare with environmental virtue — an intuition so strong that researchers have described a “humane halo” effect, where consumers who are told that a farm uses better environmental practices also assume that it treats its animals well. So it might come as a surprise to hear that one way of making eggs better for the planet might be to make life a whole lot worse for the chickens who lay them.  This, anyway, was the apparent upshot of a controversial and wide...

8 hours ago  •  On HALO