Update: Great news! The monks at Mepkin Abbey now have a thriving mushroom business. After PETA's protests, boycotts, and complaints to government agencies, the monks re-examined their egg farm and discovered that they can get all their needs met without harming animals.

The following was originally posted on December 20, 2007:

We've just heard the news that the monks at Mepkin Abbey have decided to phase out their egg-production business over the next year and a half following pressure from PETA, including protests of the monastery that are going on today. According to the Associated Press, Mepkin's Father Stan Gumula said late last night that the focus on the monks' practices as a result of PETA's investigation has been too much of a distraction, and that they will be looking for a new industry to help meet their expenses.

PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich points out that South Carolina had the 6th highest peanut production among U.S. states last year (quite how he knows such things, I have no idea), and recommends that the monks go into the booming business of peanut butter packaging, where they can pack the peanuts as tight as they like without any fear of our getting on their case about it. In fact, we might be their first customers. My own vote is more traditional—there's nothing quite like a good Trappist Ale.

Whatever they end up deciding, this is nothing short of a Christmas miracle for the chickens who have suffered for so long at Mepkin Abbey, and we commend the monks for their compassionate decision.

Here's something you won't hear too often: Austrian nuns opened a health spa to raise money for their convent after their chicken farm "fell flat." The nuns even use high-pressure hoses to spray chilled water at guests to stimulate their skin. The whole thing might not sound very conventional (there's no buff masseuse in a muscle shirt), but, hey, it's better than a chicken-breeding business. You go, sisters!

Perhaps they'll inspire the monks at Our Lady of Calvary Abbey, a monastery in Canada, to shut down their despicable factory farm and open a Jazzercise club—or at least switch to some other non-animal venture, such as making preserves, brewing beer, or growing vegetables. The monks at Mepkin Abbey made the compassionate decision to shut down their egg-laying operation and start growing oyster mushrooms following a PETA investigation.

So before you post a comment about the church's massage technique (you know you want to), please take a moment to urge the monks at Our Lady of Calvary to follow the example of their brothers at Mepkin and their sisters at Marienkron and convert to a humane alternative.

Thanks to David Best for sending this story our way.

Written by Heather Moore

Tomorrow afternoon, PETA members will be demonstrating against the horrific cruelty involved in factory-farm egg production at, of all places, a Trappist Monastery. The perpetrators in question are a group of supposedly peace-loving monks who run an operation at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina that crams 20,000 chickens into tiny wire “battery cages” so small that they barely have room to move. Although Mepkin’s monks don’t grind the male chicks up in macerators themselves—egg farms don’t have any need for male chicks, for obvious reasons—their suppliers do, and this little deal with the devil doesn’t reflect particularly well on them either. In the spirit of Christmas (which is getting ominously close), now’s a really good time for these monks to think about a new way of participating in what they call "the caring cultivation of the Earth and its creatures" that doesn’t involve torturing defenseless animals. I’ll post pictures of the demonstration tomorrow—the protestors will be stationed outside the stores in Charleston and Columbia that sell Mepkin’s eggs—but in the meantime, you can watch footage from our investigation into Mepkin Abbey below.