A hen with a clutch of eggs leaves her nest for ten to twenty minutes each day to forage for food, drink water, defecate, and stretch her wings. Artificially-incubated eggs must be cooled for fifteen to twenty minutes a day to match the time the hen is away from her nest. During the approximately 3 weeks that a chicken is incubating her eggs, she does not deprive herself of food and water for several days while on the nest. Moreover, she is bodily and mentally engaged in a highly structured holistic activity that is meaningful to her and bears no resemblance to the alien and frightening experience of being arbitrarily deprived of food. The body language, vocalizations, state of the feathers, and overall appearance of a brooding hen manifest a condition that is totally different from the appearance and behavior of a force-molted hen. An article on Animal Anorexias in Science (February 22, 1980) states that when animals fast in nature (hibernation, incubation, natural molting, migration, etc.) they evidently lose appetite (experience anorexia) because they are "engaged in other important activities that compete with feeding" and all the evidence indicates that "fasting is physiologically different from starvation."

"Induced moulting is a form of starvation"--British Poultry Science (1992)33:165-175. Comparing the removal of vital nutrients or all food from a hen to her natural, highly motivated experience of brooding and hatching her young is like arguing that depriving a defenseless person of food is the same as, or not much different from or worse than, a person's voluntary decision to go on a diet or to fast. However, a whole different set of feelings and internal mechanisms is involved in each case. Contrary to the egg industry's terminology designed to disguise the cruelty of forced molting, one creature cannot "fast" another creature. Fasting proceeds from an inner directive affecting one's own body as a reflection one's own purpose be it maternal, migratory, political or some other internally-motivated project. I can starve you but I cannot "fast" you.

Unlike animals fasting in nature, force-molted hens have been shown to lose their natural immunity and to develop and spread diseases as a result--"In conclusion, induced moulting did exert a substantial effect on the immune system of the fasted [sic] hens. . . . Cellular immunity was significantly depressed during food deprivation." Br. Poultry Science (1992) 33:165-175.