I too used to be a vegetarian who ate eggs-- free range ones, whose mothers I imagined lived happy lives clucking and pecking at seeds and insects out in open fields and orchards. But eventually, I started to question whether chicken-egg production is ethical. What happens to all those boy chickens? And what happens to those hens who are no longer productive egg layers? I no longer feel comfortable consuming chicken eggs, so I don't do it.

There is a great Far Side cartoon in which a woman is leaving the hen house with a basket of eggs, just as a hen leaves her house with her baby in a basket.