To those arguing that this is irrelevant, I urge you to search for a video of this "culling" yourself.
All the logic in the world can't ease my stomach after watching a conveyer belt of chicks get dumped directly into a meat grinder. It's simply not right. And while there are still many issues remaining in the meat industry (arguably its existence at all), this is one less.
I've seen it: It's gruesome, but I'm not sure if in-ovo sexed roosters have a better end, or if its just more palatable to watch.
Eggs take 21 days to hatch, in-ovo techniques work at 9 - 15 day post laying, depending on the technique used. Couldn't find any details on how developed the embryo is at 15 days, but 2/3's done feels pretty far along.
> conveyer belt of chicks get dumped directly into a meat grinder.
I haven't seen it, and correct me if this is not the case, but it doesn't strike me as a bad way to go. Getting macerated beats most of the ways humans and wild animals die. Do these chicks have any idea "what hit them"?
It's mercifully fast but it's still absolutely mass wholesale slaughtering of chicks because they're economically inconvenient. Also as quick and near painless as the death is it's hard to get the image of the chicks going into the grinder if you've seen it, no matter how much you know that it's fast and the chick doesn't have time to feel anything it's pretty affecting.
There's an effect where the visceral emotional response to an execution method overrides the actual cruelty of the act. Lethal injection, for example, is probably horribly painful for at least some of those that experience it[1] but it looks humane to observers. Meanwhile, the trusty guillotine would be my chosen way to go since it's nearly instant.
[1] https://eji.org/news/lethal-injections-cause-suffocation-and...
Nitrogen suffocation any day of the week in my opinion. Your brain lives long enough after the guillotine you definitely have time to feel the pain of the cut while your brain can't even register the hypoxic effects from N2 suffocation.
There's plenty of time to feel excruciating panic walking up to bend over and lose your head. The cut itself may be instantaneous but that's not really all there is to it.
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Not to get all woo, but it feels like a complete disregard for the sanctity of life. Animals are more than just an inconvenient package for protein.
It's been studied and short answer is: no. The alternative is CO2 asphyxiation, but the process is very fast and severs the spine almost immediately.
The bigger problem is chicks getting crushed to death by other chicks during processing.
Like a lot less happens to those chicks then say, when a flock of chickens is processed.
Are these crushed chicks also processed and sold (for example, as animal / pet feed)? If not, (I am wondering) why can't you just release them in the wild - in some park or forest and let nature take care of it - it's less cruel (in my opinion) if the chick becomes food for some other wildlife.
Chickens learn from their mothers how to scrounge for food when they grow up free range. Releasing 1000s of tiny yellow chicks into the wild with no mother is way more cruel than current practises I reckon.
I reckon the chicken industry also generates way more male chickens than what a park can reasonably handle. People eat lots of chickens.
How on earth is that less cruel? Have you seen how birds eat each other?
If you were a chicken behind the veil of ignorance choosing your fate, would you choose immediate death (male) or a short, difficult, confined life (female)?
To many advocates, it’s self-evident that the hen’s life is better than immediate death. This is not obvious to me. It depends on the hen’s quality of life.
I would be happy if we could just ban battery cages to start. I can't think of a more horrible fate aside from being a foie gras goose or a veal calf.
Foie-gras geese and ducks are free range, at least in France. That's a different story when you buy the cheap eastern european ones.
is the forced feeding until their liver balloons with fat free range too or...
So you think that free range geese who are forced fed have a worth living condition that the vast majority of animals raised for their meat ?
I think force feeding geese is so horrible it _almost_ doesn't matter if they're free range or not.
It's like saying a torture victim that gets water boarded daily at least gets 10 minutes of exercise every day.
Most foie gras is from ducks these days.
Is this an important distinction? Goose or duck they suffer the same.
Ducks are assholes.
Interesting perspective. Although the “death” can happen in various ways - humane or not humane.
But ultimately I can get behind the idea that the immediate death is the better outcome in the big picture..
They aren't choosing between being male or female they are identifying eggs that are going to develop into males early and removing them.
They are thus choosing between ceasing to exist before they are aware of their own existence and living approximately one day and then being ground up alive.
You're discussing a different counterfactual than the post you are replying to.
Interesting that this is already a quarter of the market in Europe? So presumably most of the wrinkles in the technique have been solved by now
Is there really a big difference if the chick is destroyed shortly before or shortly after hatching? Why is hatched-or-not the ethical standard?
Possibly this is related to our individualistic society.
The easier it is to project one's own pain onto something, the easier it is to assume that it is a universal problem.
If destroyed early enough one imagines it doesn't have a sufficient brain to have a conscious awareness of its existence and therefore would not suffer fear not pain
Then what about the chickens we slaughter for meat?
I don't see how you can support this in-ovo thing, and also eat meat. They seem to be in opposition.
Why? People often stake out positions better than comic book villains without being saints.
It's just a clump of cells. Maybe the hen isn't ready to start a family and is still discovering herself?
Her broody her choice.
Not a fan of the delivery, but, I think its an interesting point, and that both movements have a similar idea at their core, that life begins at birth / hatching. I think the parallels are interesting.
but if we go there we need to ask a more fundamental question. (to avoid a misinterpretation of what i am saying, i'd like to make clear that i am not vegan or vegetarian, i do eat meat and eggs)
the question on where life begins is rather irrelevant until we answer the question of where the life of a chicken is supposed to end.
if the possibility that life may begin at conception is going to be a consideration when destroying eggs because they are male, then the same consideration must be made when we chose to eat eggs in the first place.
we can't argue that eating eggs is ok, but destroying them is not.
consequently, as long as we eat eggs the question of when life begins is not really relevant.
the relevant questions are: can we avoid destroying/wasting those eggs at all (can we eat them?) and if ee have to destroy them, what is the most humane way to go about it? my intuition suggests that destroying the eggs is more humane than letting them hatch
That's not quite right. These male chicks are from fertilized eggs. They are the ones that, had they been female, would have become the next set of egg layers.
The eggs we eat, at least the factory farmed variety, and most / all from commercial egg farms are not fertilized. Hens lay whether they've known the touch of a rooster or not. [0].
[0] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/can_you_hatch_an_egg_bought_fr...
you are right, yes, the eggs from big producers are not fertilized. i forgot about that detail. but depending on where you are there is a good chance that you can get fertilized eggs as well, or can't be certain that they are not fertilized. nevertheless it does change the equation, because it would be possible to ensure that only unfertilized eggs are consumed. thank you for the correction.
This is the sort of issue that I think exposes a very interesting paradox in the average person.
People are worried about seemingly extraordinary cruelty perpetrated against a cute animal (maceration of young chicks) but basically accept regular, banal cruelty against typical farm animals (the practice of eating farming and eating meat and eggs).
I personally think the cause is at least on balance positive morally for any given male chick, but it’s not so clear to me that it’s moral if this scales to the point that the industry may raise more female chickens to lay eggs with less resources/comfort/etc.
I think the factory egg industry has already stripped the resources/comfort down as far as possible, so I don't see how this could make that any worse.
I'm normally resistant to claims that a new technology is going to make an unpleasant situation better, but in this case, I'm sympathetic. I'd rather get rid of the egg factories and have eggs raised the way my grandma did (and I still do). But that's not going to happen as long as people live in large cities. So if there's a way to identify the male eggs so they can be used as food before the chicks start to develop, rather than letting them hatch and then grinding up living, breathing birds, I'd have to say that's an improvement.
Discovered via https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-391
I am disturbed to find unwanted male chicks get “culled” because there is no market value for them in egg production. And there is no need for them in meat production.
This tech is able to select the female eggs only for hatching and redirect the male eggs for egging. The result is we have more eggs for people. And less waste of resources. Win win. Also a win for PETA. Something like this should be adopted en masse for market value reasons.
The eggs that humans consume are unfertilized. The eggs containing males are fertilized and will not be sold in stores. They will be macerated while they're still in the egg instead of after hatching.
Not much of a moral victory for anyone, especially considering that the hens that get to live don't have good lives.
Had to look this up: https://learnpoultry.com/fertilized-vs-unfertilized-chicken-...
Apparently, many of the eggs sold in stores are infertile. But fertile eggs can still be eaten. The process of storing them away is a little bit more cumbersome because they go bad if they are not eaten fresh.
is the consumer vote necessary? it seems like producers might appreciate saving 50% on feeding chicks
Male chicks are not feed nor raised but rather fed into a device quite similar to a wood chipper shortly áfter birth. You can read more about it here [1] or find some quite graphic videos on YouTube. This is addressed in the article:
"In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive)."
"10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs"
I really didn't see that one coming.
There was also that time when a milk company wrote the names of the cows who produced the milk on the cartons and some feminist complained that all the names were female.
One of the Minecraft mods makes you actually do the video game equivalent (thus not over the correct time period) of how we actually get milk. Instead of just right click on any cow with a bucket (like vanilla Minecraft) that mod requires you to find a boy cow and a girl cow, ensure they're both happy (well fed, no nearby predators etc.), and after a short period nature takes its course and you get a baby cow. Next, steal the baby cow, you can kill it for food or just move it to somewhere mum can't reach it. She's recently given birth so her body will make milk but now there's no baby to drink it, so you can steal the milk.
is it an urban legend, or do you have reference for that?
I think 10% of people probably just say things for their own internal amusement. I have to think there's some overlap with the people who draw penises or write or write "jokes" in bathroom stalls.
Yeah I got whiplash from my head snapping back to read that again
yeah I'm aware of male culling.
They don't feed male chicks - from the first paragraph:
> in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive).
but they'd save on incubating the eggs which they could otherwise use or sell.
I suppose that is true. But I imagine that the scale of egg incubation to produce hens is a relatively small portion of total egg production, since each hen produces many eggs. You'd probably have to compare the cost of incubating an egg and the labor to manually sex the chick to the per-egg cost of this technology. I would be surprised if that comes out in favor of the in-egg-sexing tech right now, but it would be great if it did.
> In-ovo sexing is still at the beginning stages of its rollout, and while it has become substantially cheaper since it became available 7 years ago, it still adds a few cent per dozen to the production cost of eggs.
I’m sure we’ll get there but for now it costs more.
They don't feed them. They grind them up alive then use the resulting slush to feed to other things.
what do those chicks eat? IIUC they aren't sexed immediately after hatching? Maybe I'm wrong.
Sexing is typically done immediately after hatching, yes.
They don't feed the males - they just kill them.
Does anyone know _how_ the detection process works? And is there anything done to the hen or the egg during that process that could make the egg less healthy or nutritious?
From the article that you're commenting on:
"There are multiple approaches to in-ovo sexing. One of the most prominent approaches uses advanced imaging to detect subtle optical differences between male and female embryos."
"Another widely adopted technique involves taking a small fluid sample from inside the egg to test for sex-specific hormones or genetic markers. Kipster’s eggs, launching later this year, will use a technology of this class employing PCR analysis to detect the sex chromosome, developed by the company Respeggt."
hormone testing was first and can work from 9 days (eggs hatch at day 21). Optical means (tend to work at a later point in the process around day 13-15), including various forms of spectroscopy (NMR, IR, etc): shine a light at the egg and look for differences.
Egg should be absolutely fine, but there will be a chick in there, so if you wanted to eat it like an egg, you might end up closer to balut than you want / expect.
There's no way that math is right. The wikipedia article says the US culls billions of male chicks annually. Was this written by an LLM? heh
The US culls 350 million male chicks per year, per this article. Wikipedia says billions of male chicks are culled worldwide, which seems plausible when accounting for EU, China, India, SA, SEA etc. The citation on Wikipedia looks legit to me as well.
Edit: Wikipedia does indeed cite several different figures, including a "billions" number which does not seem plausible. Thanks monster_truck for pointing this out, and apologies for my misunderstanding!
The Wikipedia article clearly has some errors, but I'm not sure where since I'm not an expert. In one spot, it says 7 billion chicks are culled annually worldwide, in other it says 8.5 billion just in the US. I assume these are likely estimates taken from different sources or at different time periods, but still, I wouldn't assume Wikipedia is accurate.
IIRC humanity eats like 70B chickens a year so sounds very plausible to me.
That kinda checks out. 1.2 billion hens are butchered in the US annually. So, maybe not multiple billions of male chicks in the grinder. But, certainly over a billion.
It might get to 2 billion if you count 375 million layers and some untold number of personal chickens.
The lives of the hens is also horrific and painful and as soon as they drop in production they are killed.
Just go vegan.
People have been killing male chicks, and keeping just a single rooster since the beginning of chickens Also is the quality of the life of these non-culled female chickens good somehow?
The point is to not have to wait for the male chicks to be born.
The article is about morality. Comment about economics. Implementation costs more. Ok.
My comment is exactly as much about morality as the article is, or as your comment is.
I’m also curious if the tech is real, or if this is just yet another scam designed to separate well-meaning people from their money.
There are at least 4 ethical/price tiers for eggs based on the quality of the hens life, and this adds a 5th to protect rooster chicks from slaughter.
Ethical eggs are a luxury good that I can afford and am willing to pay for, but the blatant 'will trade cash for feeling ethical' is tough.
I wonder what holds back developing a chicken which only produces female eggs.
Feels like the volume should mean we're not experimentally limited in the technology, and the savings are obvious.
Like a CRISPR system which turns off the male chromosomes in roosters or something.
> What are the alternatives? We are pleased to see that research is being carried out to look into ways of sexing chicks at an early stage, whilst still in the egg. These new technologies aim to do the sexing and disposal before the embryo can feel pain, which happens at around seven days. We are following these developments with interest.
https://www.rspcaassured.org.uk/farmed-animal-welfare/egg-la...
How do 10% not know boys don't lay eggs and the plurality not realize we don't eat roosters
People are not required to think about the food, so they don't. For example, it's widely known that milk comes from cows, but not that the cow needs to be pregnant in order to do so, again and again. It's just not something that one faces in their day to day life. These things just spawn on supermarket shelves, and that's about it.
I wouldn't have thought we don't eat roosters. We eat bulls, so the line of thought that you use one sex for production and one for meat is kinda easy? (and hens for meat when they age out of laying etc)
It's actually somewhat the same in cattle. There are beef breeds of cattle for meat and dairy breeds for milk. Dairy breeds tend to be skinnier and don't grow as efficiently, so the bulls don't make good beef steers. There's kind of a specialty market in them for people who think a dairy steer raised and fed over a longer time for meat is better than the beef breeds that have been focused on efficient growth. But some dairy bull calves are just killed. The heifer calves are far more valuable.
TIL, very interesting. I guess you can't escape specialization anywhere.
If you have a chicken farm, you likely eat roosters time to time.
> not realize we don't eat roosters
The French do.
coq au vin?
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I’m struggling to see the nefarious angle here—-this seems like a case where both ethical and efficiency concerns are well-aligned, for a modest increase in cost that may disappear with scale. How is this anything other than a win?
Wait, so we can all agree that killing the male chicks is inhumane. But you think the solution, _to not birth the male chicks_, is just as inhumane?
If so, awful take. This is infinitely better and most definitely a step in the right direction.
Hens live in cages the size of a piece of paper (A4/letter), they are kept there for 2 years. Very small percentage of them live in better circumstances. What leaves a bad taste is calling that "humanely hatched". EDIT: Apparently here in Sweden about 20% that have the guaranteed possibility of moving around outside then hen house, and less than 1% still live in solitary confinement so I was wrong at least over here. EDIT2: Apparently about 50% live in the worst kind of cages in the US.
No, you are putting words into my mouth. Try to argue in good faith through understanding the other party's viewpoint before responding.
I don't see much difference between killing chicks after them being born, or stopping them from being born in the first place. The only difference is in the efficiency of business operations.
If my values are that each deserves a chance at a life--whatever life it may be, I can advocate for searching for a better solution. I did not prescribe an alternative, don't pretend that I have.
EDIT: Damn, the hostile responses (Ad hominem, bad faith arguments, etc) to such a simple philosophical discussion I've been getting are unbelievable. I don't think there is much value in participating anymore. Thank you everyone for your responses.
Nobody is putting words in your mouth. They are reacting directly to the absolutely bonkers statements you are making that there is ethically no difference between killing 350 million live, healthy male chicks every year and preventing those chicks from being born in the first place.
"I don't see much difference between killing chicks after them being born, or stopping them from being born in the first place."
I do. One of those involves a (presumably painful) death of a conscious animal. The other does not.
The other option - a living female chick - also ends in the premature death of a conscious animal, additionally after a (presumably painful) life. Does it not?
Sure. That doesn't mean that there is no difference between not having a male chick being born compared to killing it directly after it has been sexed.
Good faith clarification: you’re saying you believe that preventing chicks from being born causes an equal amount of suffering to an animal as the (what would otherwise be) physical extermination of those chicks?
> > Wait, so we can all agree that killing the male chicks is inhumane. But you think the solution, _to not birth the male chicks_, is just as inhumane?
> No, you are putting words into my mouth.
As an onlooking third party, I don't understand. You further say:
> I don't see much difference between killing chicks after them being born, or stopping them from being born in the first place.
But as far as I can understand it, that is the same thing.
> I did not prescribe an alternative, don't pretend that I have.
It was not supposed that you were prescribing an alternative. The words "you think the solution" were not introducing a supposed solution of yours; they were introducing a solution (the process discussed in TFA) about which you (appeared to) have a thought.
> The only difference is in the efficiency of business operations.
Are you implying that the chicks being killed are not suffering?
> If the proponents of this truly believe that this is more humane, it really is targeting the wrong level
If something isn't more humane, it must be the same or less. I think it is you who needs to better articulate your position broski.
But that aside, one method kills living creatures and the other does not. If you cannot see a difference then I'm afraid you are lost.
So you're saying there's no difference between (1) not breeding dogs to fight and (2) breeding dogs and have them fight each other?
I have to say this, I'm sorry.
--
Isn't this carrying the pro life movement too far? Chickens do not have souls, in the biblical context.
If this isn't a religious thing, then note the article has two methods. One detecting feather differences, the other a genetic test.
The genetic test should be quite early. If at that stage, I imagine a blade of grass has more intelligence, there isn't a brain yet, and nerves don't even exist.
No pain, no feeling, just a few dozen cells hanging out.
Does this not seem OK to you, if the case?
What do you propose to do with so many roosters?
No reason to criticize an improvement because it doesn't solve every problem.
male chicks aren't useful if we bring them into being we will have to kill them.
Male chicks make as good of soup as hens. However, roosters are assholes and don't get along with other roosters by the time they are butcher weight.
They don't get along with any animals, and the problem starts well before they're butcher weight. It's not uncommon for an entire hen house to wind up murdered if you don't sex your chickens.
> It's not uncommon for an entire hen house to wind up murdered if you don't sex your chickens.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
Just google chicken glasses as a start of a thread to pull on.
Yes, I'm aware that chickens can be aggressive or even occasionally cannibalistic (although that's never happened to any groups of chickens I've seen).
But that doesn't explain anything about why you're saying an entire hen house can be murdered when you fail to sex chicks. I've never heard that male chicken are worse in this regard, excessive feather pecking is a result of keeping chickens in terrible environments like battery/cage farms and happens in fully female groups.
It happens from time to time even with free range chickens if a rooster picks a fight while they're all in the coop for the night.
Do elaborate. Does Chad Thundercock go ballistic on all the hens?
Pretty much. Small-time chicken owner here. The best ratio of hens to roosters is about 10-to-1. Each rooster will have his "harem" of hens that keep him busy, and the hens will be content. Any more roosters than that and they'll fight a lot, and the roosters that don't have their own group of hens will hang around the others looking for a chance to rape them while their regular rooster is occupied or too far away. It can be pretty hard on the hens.
I've never had a rooster kill hens, though. Each other, sure, but not the hens. I don't really buy that.
Some context for this article that most people don't know: there are chicken breeds for meat (Cornish Cross, mostly) and breeds for eggs. The egg breeds are skinny and won't become a good meat bird no matter how much you feed them. I guess you can caponize them and they'll gain more weight, but that's a process that costs money. You could use them for soup, but that probably wouldn't be cost-effective either, so that's why the large-scale operations just kill them.
> The best ratio of hens to roosters is about 10-to-1. Each rooster will have his "harem" of hens that keep him busy, and the hens will be content. Any more roosters than that and they'll fight a lot, and the roosters that don't have their own group of hens will hang around the others looking for a chance to rape them while their regular rooster is occupied or too far away. It can be pretty hard on the hens.
It seems like a sick joke of nature that a species that behaves this way wouldn't also naturally be born in a similar ratio. I wonder if they're like that in the wild, too....
There's no real such thing as a "natural" chicken, but their ancestors, red junglefowl, are similar. In fact, healthier females produce more males (https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/119/3/840/5561973). Perhaps it's evolutionary turned out to be good for fitness of the species if 90% of the males are killed by other males or otherwise don't mate and that outweighs "wasting" 4.5/10 eggs. Nature doesn't "care" (yes, yes, active verb for non-conscious process) if it's pretty, just that it works.
In general, life in nature just ain't that fun as a junior member of an r-selected species, which includes chickens.
My in-laws turned quite a few roosters into dinners while trying to find one which actually had an even temper with their chickens, so yeah it's a serious issue.
That only works, if you know it's a chicken:
You don't usually leave roosters whole if you keep them for food. You make Capons, they get huge, almost like turkeys but with all the juicy benefits of a fat chicken.
The problem with egg roosters is that the breads used for eggs are so badly bred for maximum egg laying that they mostly unusable for good food. Might be good for pet food and canned stuff.
The real solution here is to demand mixed bread chickens that lay slightly fewer eggs, but can also be used for good meat.
It sounds like (based on the article), large-scale companies will usually either do eggs or chicken meat, not both. So you're not wrong but I see why it's not that simple.
Broiler that is meat chicken and egg laying chickens are different breeds. So focusing on one of those is pretty sensible.