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.
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.
196 is a meme/miscellaneous community. This is a meme ergo fits within the community. Pretty much the only rule of this community is “if you visit the community you must post” besides rules like no transphobia, racism, etc.
Oh fun skimming through their comments shows them also dissmising climate change effects too. Comments downplaying a senario of +5°C average temperature increase
I’d think they could genetically engineer the egg layers to only produce males in certain conditions (such as when they’re incubated at a higher temperature), then only breed males when they need more roosters.
OR, if sex is selected by sperm type (as with humans) artificially inseminate the hens.
I suspect there are dozens of valid technical solutions that are cost effective and would allow them to not shred male chicks.
I presume, like everything else wrong with Capitalism, it comes down to cost. It’s more cost efficient somehow. I don’t understand the details, because I’m not a chicken farmer, but I have been in the capitalism machine for a long, long time, and I’d bet a shitton of tax payer money that it’s purely down to cost.
If it saves $0.02 per chicken, they’ll gladly poison the rivers, oceans, lakes, etc. with refuse and baby chick corpses.
In this case it’s because if you raised them no-one would want to buy them. The egg laying breeds are a lot tougher and have a lot less meet than the ones bred for meat. They also cost more per amount of meat in the end.
The simple fact is that people don’t want to buy that, so it’d just be wasteful to grow them out.
I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.
So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.
The hens are bred for laying as much eggs as possible, on the cost of meat production. this means, that it isn’t profitable to raise them, just to get some meat, when you can raise other chicken breads to get twice the amount of meat.
Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.
Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.
I have been seeing a lot of animal abuse posts on here lately. I hadn’t noticed 196 being like that in the past on here or Reddit. Is there a trend toward that for this community in general? I’m well aware of how fucked the industry is, but I also don’t sub to this community for that. I am here for little gay people shit posting in my phone. These just make me sad. I can’t personally do anything to stop this. I don’t want to unsub, and there’s not a great way to filter, unless it’s all the same OP? :(
You can always upvote or share a post like this to spread awaraness and hence maybe make people buy less eggs, or at least make them pause to think before they buy their next eggs.
Yes, so that maybe some day in the future this horrible shit is no more. Until then, get used to bumping into a thought provoking meme every now. The mild discomfort pales in comparison to the practice itself.
Well, as a queer vegan. Its really hard not to notice that bigots and carnists say the same sort of things.
“You’re just trying to feel special.” “It’s unnatural, your gentials/teeth were evolved for a specific use”. “Stop trying to convert kidsto your cult.” “Queer/vegan people always think they are so enlighted.”
But more to the point, defeatism is always an easy excuse to do nothing. But individual actions can have ripple effects through generations. Do you think that those at stonewall would expect an entire month celebrating their actions? Enough people making a choice not to support animal agriculture puts the concept out of business. Do I expect that or liberation soon? No. But it’s gotten LIGHTYEARS better on both fronts in my own lifetime.
Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.
Couldn’t that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn’t going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.
If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you’ll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!
The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It’s going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable
And with systematic action, it’s still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We’re going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption
The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there’s been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
yeah i feel you. i don’t think this would be better even if i were vegan (i’m not bc i think i would starve due to a number of dietary restrictions /allergies, but i cycle in the vegan food i can)
It might still not be popular to be vegan yet, but the movement is growing rapidly. It could be a symptom of a larger trend - that the injustices against non-human animals is too terrible to keep Ignoring.
Sometimes it just needs to be recognized that a problem isn’t going to go away until we start doing the hard work of solving it together.
That also wasn’t my point at all. I’m making no statement here about veganism. I’m saying 196 isn’t a vegan activism community and these bummer posts are obnoxious.
AS far AS i know, there are experiments with identifying the gender in the egg, but it isn’t practically usable on a big scale. I might be wrong, would love if someone knew more about this.
Only in a select few places. It doesn’t scale super well among other potential issues
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
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