Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Over the years we have been conditioned to like certain things and dislike others. Sometimes these likes come in waves called fashion and die out, others are ingrained in us over decades. We, in India , still haven’t in the 70 years of Independence, got over the belief that a fair complexion is better than a dark one.

So it is with eggs. Most egg eaters believe that the yellower an egg, the better it is. If the yolk is orange-red, it has the most vitamins and Omega 3, and the least cholesterol.

This could be true if we were still eating eggs that came from chickens that roam in the sun, in open fields with good , “unpesticided” grass with natural insects in it. But that time is long gone. The eggs you eat are from industries called poultries and most chickens have never seen a green field. A “free range” egg simply means that instead of been crushed into cages, the chickens are brought up on the overcrowded cement floor of the factory.

A yolk can only be yellow if the chicken is in natural sunlight and eats natural foods. High carotenoid foods, such as leafy greens and lucerne grass, make yolks a darker orange. Otherwise the yolk remains pale white. And the consumer believes that he is eating a bad egg. So, poultries all over the world use chemicals as yolk colour enhancers.

These cosmetic food dyes are placed in feed pellets and carefully calibrated to get the desired yellow shade, or “ideal colour outcome”. In fact, egg shade cards (Roche Colour Fan) are freely available on the Net and are sold to poultries.

The “free range” and “organic” poultry dyes will make you believe that their dyes are derived from capsicum, marigold or paprika. Fresh corn and turmeric extracts can make the yolk look more orange. Peppers make it redder. The colour of the yolk, we believe, can inform us about the health and living conditions of the chicken. A darker orange yolk tells us that a chicken is eating a diet on open pasture, where it feeds on carotenoid-rich grasses, insects, seeds, vegetables and flowers, and so is getting enough vitamins and carotenoids from the natural pigments of plants.

Not true. They are being fed chemicals in the form of pigments. Yolk colour has no longer any relationship to quality or nutritive value. All chickens in poultry factories are fed mainly cheap, non nutritious grain, and this produces a pale or white yolk. 

Poultry owners had discovered 60 years ago that they can control egg yolk colour. Giving yellow vegetables, like carrots and squash, in the food increases carotinoids and xanthophylls and makes the yolk a richer colour and the feed far more nutritious. Both the chicken and egg benefit.

But natural foods are expensive products when the industry wants to sell eggs cheap. So they use chemical dyes.

These serve two purposes : they make the sick, malnourished chicken, brought up on an inappropriate diet of mainly grain to make it fatter quickly, look more orange. People will sometimes refuse to buy pale bodies.

And they give the yolks colour.

There are thousands of sellers of these dyes on the Net. Some sell marigold extract in both powder and liquid form - India is the top seller of these dyes.  Most of the cheap, synthetic carotenoid dyes are manufactured in China. Scientists have perfected 16 yolk colours in a yolk fan, which go from light yellow to intense orange and these are sold to different countries depending on consumer traditions.

Here are some of the chemicals:

Some are semi natural like Lutein, which the sellers claim is a purified extract of xanthophylls from marigold oleoresins, or oils mixed with potassium hydroxide, methanol or propylene glycol. The resulting chemical is called Zeanthaxin.

But, most are just synthetic chemicals like Rovimix Carophyll Yellow, Canthaxanthin and Xanthophyll B. Some of the dyes have iron oxides in them.

There are hundreds of synthetic chemical  dyes on the market. One of the largest international sellers is BASF, and they start their propaganda for chemical dyes by saying that poultry cannot produce carotinoids on their own so they have to fed them, as the market prefers chickens with more orange feet and deeper coloured yolk. And feeding them natural food like marigold petals, turmeric etc. causes egg yolks to have varying colours and can only give a faint colouring of lemony yellow, so it is better for poultries to standardize their products and make their yolks a deep orange by using their products called Lucantin Yellow and Lucantin Red which have a chemical mysteriously called C-30.

Using chemicals is bad enough, but using banned ones is extremely dangerous.

In a recent study "Effect of Pigments with Different Origins on Pigmentation and Performance of Broilers" by Tarique Tunio, Shuming Yang et al, of the State Key Laboratory of Agro-Product Quality and Safety, Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology for Agro-products, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing China  and Department of Agricultural Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan, the scientists found that poultries are buying dyes which are a combination of lutein and synthetic canthaxanthin and orange-II.

Orange II, or Acid Orange 7,  is a banned dye belonging to the class of Azo dyes. These Azo dyes are carcinogenic (Boeninger, 1980). Many countries now regulate the use of azo-dyes in food products and the use of these dyes in food is strongly prohibited.

But they are used freely in India in the dyeing industry. Orange II is used in inks, paper, paint coatings and plastics. Since the chemical is cheap and freely available, and makes the egg and chicken a deep yellow/orange, it is used  by irresponsible poultry producers in the entire subcontinent and China.

The study discovered that natural Lutein had the best impact on colour. But it was expensive. Orange II had the same impact and it is very cheap.  But while Lutein had no adverse impact on chickens, Orange II causes severe breast muscle fibrosis in chickens. Not only is that extremely painful for the birds, it also makes their meat very chewy and inedible after they are killed. Canthaxanthin, which is the second option, also caused fibrosis in chickens but to a lesser degree.

The study recommended that investigations be done to determine the effects and stop the use of authorized synthetic pigments being used in this large scale.

So, what do these colouring agents do to you ? They allow the poultry owners to feed their hens bad food, keep them in a state of malnutrition while pumping them with chemicals to keep them alive and artificially obese, and make the skin and eggs look healthy by colouring them. The chickens would have gotten many more nutrients if they had really grazed in the open. A study done at Penn State University showed that chickens, who grazed outside and were given natural foods, had deep yellow yolks with twice the amount of Vitamin R, Omega 3 fatty acids and 38% more Vitamin A than factory farmed eggs. Less cholesterol. Less saturated fat.

Forget the chickens. When you eat the deep yellow yolk, you could be paving the way to cancer. 


Maneka Sanjay Gandhi












Pasteurella multocida can cause skin and soft tissue infections, following a bite or scratch. Pain,  swelling, and erythema often develop and progress rapidly.


Streptococcus spp. causes streptococcal pharyngitis, pyoderma, abscesses, cellulitis, endocarditis, polyarthritis, pneumonia and septicemia.  Streptococcal toxic shock syndrome is an  often fatal disease characterized by shock and multiorgan failure.



Enterococcus spp., particularly E. faecalis,  also causes multi organ infections in humans. The bacteria are resistant to many antibiotics. A study, of ten human patients with osteomyelitis, showed that eight cases were due to infection by E. faecalis. A study in Brazil showed the presence of this bacterium in 42% of the chicken carcasses tested (Campos et al). All strains were resistant to the antibiotics tested. E. faecalis is particularly dangerous because it has the ability to transfer its resistance genes to other organisms present in the intestinal tract of humans and animals, limiting the utilization of antibacterial drugs (Campos et al., 2013).

Contamination of animals and their by-products, by resistant bacteria and their transmission to humans, are an animal and public health concern. The sicker the animal, the sicker you will get when you eat it.




3. Avoid high housing density.

4. Ensure adequate access to feeders.

5.Keep the place clean and prevent respiratory diseases. This means emptying and completely disinfecting the broiler house; changing the litter; adequate cleaning of water lines and continuously sanitizing the water. All practices, to prevent bacterial infections, would help lessen bone inflammation.


To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www. peopleforanimalsindia. org

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi

Mimicry, by changing form, shape and colour, is unique to animals. Imagine if you went into a Chinese or African neighbourhood and had to blend in. Or become shorter, fatter, change the shape of your nose, increase the number of arms, the odour your body emits. We can't do any of these things even if our lives depend on it.

But animals and insects do it easily. They change their forms to look like species that predators avoid. Their scents change, their colours blend in with the background or with their prey. Their ways of surviving are nothing less than magical.

The Mock Viper of  Asia is a harmless snake. It looks like a dangerous viper with a triangular head. The difference is that the mock viper has round pupils. True vipers’ pupils are vertical slits.

The Mock Viper is so clever that, when threatened, it squeezes the shape of its pupils to look like the slits of a true pit viper and then, in the panic this causes, it flees.

It's not just while protecting themselves, animals that hunt need to be clever too. Some fool their prey into believing they are harmless, while they get close to them.

The Green Lacewing larva feeds on Woolly Alder Aphids who are herded by ants. So, it plucks the white waxy wool from an aphid’s back, attaches it to its own and fools the ant shepherds into believing it is part of their flock. Once inside the circle, it eats the aphids.

The Zone Tail Hawk feeds on live animals, but it mimics the flight of a vulture who is a carrion eater. Small animals, who would have normally rushed for cover on seeing a hawk, are deceived by the gliding flight and vulture-like outline and are snatched up.

The Cleaner Fish is harmless and its function is to eat the parasites on larger fish who stand in line to be attended to. The predatory Sabre Tooth Blennny  has black and blue markings like the Cleaner and it imitates its swimming pattern and loiters at cleaning stations to dupe clients waiting to be cleaned. It comes close to large fish and bites a chunk out of them before darting away.

The Dusky Dottyback is a small 3 inch harmless looking fish which lives in our Indo Pacific coral reefs . Its normal colour varies from pink to grey,  but  it can change into any colour – green, yellow brown – to match its prey. It tricks baby fish of larger species into thinking it is one of them. Then it eats them. Its favourite prey are baby Damselfish. This unique talent allows the Dottyback to easily approach juvenile Damselfish without detection and, by the time the group is alerted, it has eaten several babies and moved to new groups of fish with new colours.

The Slender Trumpet Fish swims vertically among the soft coral branches and changes its colour to match them. It is almost invisible to the small animals that it hunts.

The Marine Flatworm increases its size to look like a Sea Slug, which is avoided by aquatic predators because it emits a poisonous and malodorous substance.

The Milk Snake is harmless, but changes itself gradually to develop bands like the venomous coral snake. Is this mimicry or a coincidence ? Definitely deliberate mimicry, because it happens only in those regions where Milk snake and Coral snake are found together. In other regions the Milk snake doesn’t look anything like the Coral snake.

Young Bushveld Lizards in Southern Africa mimic the noxious Oogpister’ beetles. As adults the lizards will camouflage themselves with the red-tan colours of the Kalahari semi-desert, but as juveniles the lizards become black and white and move with stiff, jerky movements, with backs strongly arched, to look like the Oogpister beetles who are avoided by all as they spray a pungent, acidic fluid on anyone who threatens them.

The harmless Hognosed snake, when threatened, pretends to be a rattlesnake. It raises its head as it is about to strike and makes a rattling sound from its throat. If that doesn’t work it pretends to be dead and gives off a rotting smell.

Many moths, of the families Arctiidae and Ctenuchidae, are foul-tasting and are avoided by bats who hunt by sound and  recognize their high pitched clicks. Other moths, who are edible, protect themselves as soon as they hear the bats coming by emitting the same clicks. Scientists experimented by putting out mealworms that are a favourite food of bats.  These were accompanied by recorded moth clicks. The captive bats ignored the mealworms, choosing to go hungry.

Male Photinus fireflies of North American emit pulses of light in very specific patterns when they go to find mates. The females remain on the ground and  responds to the flash pattern of  the male with her own light pattern. The flying male responds to her signal by approaching, landing, and mating.

The Photuris female firefly is a predator and eats Photinus fireflies. What she does is to copy the light signals of the Photinus female. The hapless male, after landing, is seized and eaten by the Photuris. In response to males of her own species, whom she does not eat, the female Photuris gives a flash response quite different from that of Photinus.

This one is my favourite :  The female  African mouth-breeding Cichlid fish  lays eggs and takes the eggs into her mouth immediately after they are laid, even before the male can fertilize them with his sperm. The male develops yellow, or orange, spots near the base of his anal fin, which closely resemble the eggs. He comes near the female and displays these spots.  The female thinks that she has missed out some loose eggs and attempts  pick them up in her mouth. As she opens her mouth the male release his sperm and she takes in the sperm that fertilize the eggs in her mouth.

Death’s Head Hawkmoths need honey, so they mimic the smell of bees, allowing themselves to get into hives without being stung. There, they ignore the bees, choosing to feed on the sugary honey stored inside. As soon as they leave, they resume their own odours.

The Alligator Snapping Turtle has a large set of jaws, but how does it get fish to enter its mouth ? These freshwater turtles disguise themselves among the dead wood and mud at the bottom of rivers and lakes, open their mouths and wiggle the small growth on their tongues. This growth looks and behaves like a worm. As soon as the fish takes the bait, and enters the still mouth, the jaws snap shut and the fish is dinner.

The Spider-tailed Horned Viper of Iran uses the appendage at the end of its tail in the same way. The end is a bulbous structure with thin growths jutting out of it. The structure looks like a spider. The snake moves behind rocks and raises the tip of its tail onto a rock so that birds can see it. When a bird  swoops down to capture the spider, the snake attacks.

I just read today that the Chinese Paddlefish of the Yangtze river, a 200 million year old species that survived the dinosaurs, has finally gone extinct due to overfishing and the construction of dams. It was a unique and extraordinary animal who could grow to 23 feet. It used its special sword-like snout to sense electrical activity to find its crustacean and fish prey. Again, magic. Most humans have no idea of the magical world that they destroy day after dreary, blood filled, violent day. 
