As Easter approaches — a holiday centered on renewal and new life — millions of people are glued to a livestream in Big Bear, California, watching a bald eagle named Jackie tend to her eggs. After ravens destroyed her earlier clutch, viewers mourned alongside her. Now they’re cheering her on, hoping the eggs hatch safely.

It’s moving to see so many people invested in the fate of two tiny lives.

The devotion of a mother bird resonates with us. Eagles mate for life. They carefully incubate their eggs. They defend their nests fiercely. When something goes wrong, we feel it. But as we celebrate Jackie’s eggs this Easter season, it’s worth asking: Why does our compassion stop there?

Chickens are birds, too. Like eagles, hens communicate with their chicks before they hatch, gently clucking to them from inside the nest. Research shows that mother hens teach their young which foods to eat and display signs of empathy when their chicks are distressed. They form complex social hierarchies, recognize dozens of other individuals and worry about future events.

Yet while two eggs in a treetop nest draw national attention, billions of hens’ eggs each year are treated as little more than commodities.

In the egg industry, most hens spend their lives confined in crowded sheds or stacked cages. Even in “cage-free” systems, birds are packed by the thousands into massive warehouses, where stress and disease run rampant. Their sensitive beaks are partially cut off without pain relief to reduce injuries when stressed birds peck one another in the crowded sheds. And when their egg production drops—usually after just two years—they’re slaughtered.

Male chicks, who can’t lay eggs and aren’t bred to grow quickly enough for meat, are killed shortly after hatching—often by gassing or being ground up alive.

Many shoppers reach for cartons labeled “cage-free”—or “humane” or “free-range”—hoping to make a kinder choice. But a recent white paper published by PETA, reviewing federal inspection records and scientific studies, found that “cage-free” systems still subject hens to intense crowding, chronic stress and injury. In some cases, birds suffer just as much as—or more than—those in caged facilities, with reports indicating that up to 97% of hens in certain systems sustain broken bones. The labels may sound reassuring, but the reality for birds is not.

Easter is often associated with eggs as symbols of life. For Christians, it’s a celebration of compassion, mercy and the triumph of love over suffering. Scripture reminds us that “[t]he righteous care for the needs of their animals” (Proverbs 12:10).

If that principle guides us, then surely it applies not only to majestic eagles nesting in pine trees but also to the hens hidden away in industrial sheds.

We don’t need a livestream to tell us that chickens value their lives. We don’t need to see a nest high above a forest floor to recognize a mother protecting her young. The same qualities that move us to root for Jackie and her eggs are present in birds far less celebrated.

This Easter, when eggs typically take center stage in grocery carts, recipes and decorations, we can choose new and better traditions that reflect the compassion the holiday represents. Vegan egg options for cooking and synthetic ones for painting are widely available. Even dyeing potatoes instead of eggs—a simple swap that spares hens entirely—can preserve the fun without the harm.

Let’s let all birds keep their eggs and extend the same empathy we feel for Jackie and her family to the hens whose eggs fill grocery store shelves.

Compassion shouldn’t depend on a bird’s wingspan.

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Scott Miller is a staff writer for the PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

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