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Depend on the eggs. Farm ? Yes, most of them are unethical. Home chicken ? Not unethical, if there are no roosters.
What makes it unethical if there's a rooster?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can't stop a hen from laying eggs.
The hens I've met abandons most of their eggs, for most of the year. If the hen abandons the egg, it won't grow or hatch regardless of fertilization, so as long as you only take the abandoned eggs, a rooster makes no difference in the ethics of eating those eggs.
The difference is that what I've heard a flock usually does better and feels better with a rooster (this may be propaganda from Big Rooster), and if you don't interrupt the nesting process (I dont know the English word for it, when the hen lays on the eggs until they hatch?), you'll keep putting more of the birds into the world which may not be ethical according to the person.
So positives and negatives, but no difference in the abandoned eggs.
But is this a wild hen roaming free, or imprisoned?
What's unethical about roosters?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can't stop a hen from laying eggs.
You would have to be a life-begins-at-conception, anti-abortion kind of person, as well, for that.
It's not an impossible or unnatural combination, intellectually, but demographically speaking, being radical in two directions at once is rare.
A vegetarian would be fine with a backyard coop. Vegans might say that your chickens are kind of like slaves - they make stuff for you, and can't leave - and that's bad.
You're right on that, I can't deny it. But then again, I had some vegans friends that had hens that were saved from the slaghterhouse. They had no barriers at all and their hens roamed free. Yes, a hen is a product of human selection, and on that aspect the line between ethical and practical is really fine and more suitable to philosophical debates, but since the hens were saved, they were better off their fate and in that regard, harvesting eggs was not an act of torture per se. But I'm not a vegan and can't speak for them, just give an insight on a non-dicheotomic point of view.
Actually, layers are pretty close to natural red junglefowl, as far as I can tell. It's not like turkeys or cows, where they can't really exist in the wild. Although, the wild sucks too...
I'm in the picture FWIW, as a vegetarian who's cared for backyard hens. They seemed fine and happy, if a little bored in the winter, and were pretty great and easy-to-care-for pets. If there was any money in fixing the gender ratio problem, that bit about what happens to the male chicks would probably be solved, as well.
Turkeys do live in the wild
It's kind of a wolf/dog situation. Yeah they're the same species but domestic turkeys wouldn't do well in the wild. They get too big to fly.
Or, you know, mate without IVF. Those breasts are so big, turkeys can't mount each other, anymore.
A lot of meat birds, if not slaughtered, will literally grow until their insides get crushed, as well.
That's an interesting aspect that I hadn't considered. It brings the question of "does life begin at fertilization" into this.