I had this same question, I learned “meat” chickens are called broiler chickens, they were bred to put on weight rapidly. Egg laying chickens are separate breed and grow slower or won’t grow to the size of a broiler. The industry is limited by containment footage, so they wouldn’t use a male egg laying chick where they could house a broiler.
If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.
It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.
They’re totally different breed designed to lay as much eggs as physically possible compared to broilers that are designed to grow edible muscle as much and as fast as possible.
Because we like big chicken breasts and we cannot lie.
(Male chickens of egg-laying breeds don’t have as much meat, and also the males left together often compete and can try to kill each other. You’d want around a dozen hens per rooster, compared to roughly 1:1 that would come out naturally with eggs, and have enough space for each to call their own).
The industry kills them right away because they’re not selectively breeded to grow as fast as broilers do. Egg laying chicken have been selectively bred to lay high quantities of eggs instead
Due to modern selective breeding, laying hen strains differ from meat production strains (broilers).
As an aside, in both cases, the selective breeding has led to all kinds of health issues for these birds. Broilers can hardly walk due to being fast-growing. Egg laying chickens have all kind of bone health problems due to producing lots of eggs (takes a lot of calcium to produce an egg shell)
My dad has had pet chickens for decades, and his roosters always chill. They’re highly intelligent animals. If you give them lots of vegetation and space and provide for their basic needs and well-being, they don’t really get too aggressive.
There’s no way socialism would provide that either on the scale that the Western world consumes chickens. We should still go vegan in a socialist economy.
That’s only in industrial egg production. If you’re a local farmer and you need to dispose of the males, your go to quick and painless option might be a potato sack or your hands.
Industrial egg production is the vast majority of egg production. Using the word only there is perhaps a bit misleading when for instance, 98.2% of US egg production is from factory farms [1]
I’m not sure one can call any of those methods painless either
The technology for it that currently does not scale to higher egg consumption rather well among other potential problems
They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.
[…]
One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another
maybe, but you can’t feed a population on backyard farms. If everybody wants to eat eggs, there has to be a massive production, and it will be this kind of hell. The only logical way to prevent this is to stop treating animals as resources. We are perfectly able to feed with plants, we know how to get every necessary nutrient. Animal agriculture needs to stop, and if we’re truly leftists, we have to stand against any exploitation. How could we evolve as a society if we continue to use sentient beings as mere resources?
Chickens are domesticated to the point that they cannot survive in the wild / have no ecological niche. Without some small scale animal agriculture like backyard chickens they would go extinct, though you could argue it’s for the best.
Personally I think small-scale egg farming is not exploitative when the chickens are treated well.
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