The egg industry systematically kills millions of male chicks just after being hatched because they consider them surplus to requirement.
Many people know that the eggs they eat from chickens are not fertilised, and are just laid by hens that are bred in such a way that they can produce both fertilised and unfertilised eggs. But where do such hens come from? They come for fertilised eggs, of course, so for the industry to survive, it needs to keep producing fertilised eggs to replace the hens that are ”spent” and produce fewer eggs when their stressed bodies give up (the egg industry kills all the laying hens after 2-3 years of being forced to produce eggs, while the natural lifespan of a chicken is 8-10 years). However, around 50% of the fertilised eggs hatched are male (in nature, and so far this still applies to domesticated farmed animals too, roughly the percentage of male and female birth is around 50%), and males do not produce eggs.
You may think that those males would be grown to be sold for the meat industry, but this is not the case, because the breeds used for meat (broiler chickens) are not the same breeds used for eggs, so growing them for meat would not be profitable for the farmers as they would not be ballooned up to produce extra flesh as the genetically modified broiler chickens are. In consequence, the egg industry systematically kills all the male chicks soon after hatching — as they don’t want to spend any resources keeping them alive for more than a day.
This means that the global egg industry destroys about 7 billion newborn male chicks every year, 300 million of which are killed in the US alone. In Denmark, more than three million day-old male layer chicks were culled in 2023. In India, over 180 million male chicks are culled annually. In the UK, more than 40 million male chicks are killed.
This issue is the same for big factory-farmed egg producers or small farms, whether they are free-range, organic, battery-caged, or enriched-caged. No matter which type of farm we are talking about, male chicks will never produce eggs or be profitable for meat production.
How chicks are killed
Male chicks are killed the same day they are born, in a process the industry euphemistically calls “chick culling”, either by suffocation, gassing or being thrown alive into a high-speed grinder. Most methods of killing do not involve anaesthetics and the animals are conscious when they are killed.
The most common method of killing chicks by asphyxiation is gassing them with carbon dioxide gas (similar to how pigs are killed in gas chambers), but other gases such as argon and nitrogen are also used. Gas mixtures that can be used are 90% argon (or other inert gas) and a maximum of 2% total oxygen by volume; a maximum of 30% carbon dioxide and a minimum of 60% argon (or other inert gas) with no more than 2% total oxygen by volume.
Cervical dislocation is another method of killing chicks, in which the neck of the chick is broken. Electrocution is another method of destroying the chicks en masse, in which an electric current is passed through the chick’s body until it is dead. Suffocation is also used, where the chicks are placed in closed plastic bags until they run out of oxygen.
Shredding millions of live male chicks to death, also called “maceration”, “grinding”, “mincing” or IMD, which means “Instantaneous Mechanical Destruction”), is one of the most common methods to kill male chicks, and even if a few countries have started banning this practice, such as Italy and Germany, it is still common in other places, such as the US and Australia. This involves using a high-speed grinder, but there are two different types: “crushing”, which causes the chicks to be crushed between two rollers which are rapidly rotating, and “knife-type”, which include devices that contain fast-moving blades that mince the alive chicks.
In the EU, the regulations on this subject started in 1976 and evolved in 1993 with the first directive to specifically deal with male chicks. A new directive was adopted in 2009, which was last updated in 2019. This authorises the killing of chicken chicks by the use of a mechanical apparatus causing rapid death or exposure to carbon dioxide. In the US, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AMVA) recommend cervical dislocation, maceration, and asphyxiation by carbon dioxide as methods to kill chicks,
In 2015, Animal Aid, a British animal rights organisation, said to The Independent, “That their few short hours of life are ended in a gas chamber or minced alive in an industrial macerator is beyond cruel. Consumers should be aware that this is what they are paying for when they buy eggs, regardless of whether they are from caged or free range hens.”
Alternatives to culling chicks
In the 2010s, scientists developed technologies to determine the sexes of chicks when they are still in their eggs (in-ovo sexing), so there is no longer any justification for killing the chicks after hatching. These technologies, such as Respeggt, In Ovo, Orbem, and CHEGGY, are gaining momentum across Europe as they perform the sexing before the chicks have hatched so the eggs that may develop male can be destroyed.
According to a report from Innovate Animal Ag published in September 2023, research in-ovo sexing technology had been successfully applied to at least 56 million of the commercial EU layer population of 389 million hens.
Those supporting these technological innovations developed by the industry itself claim the male eggs are destroyed before the embryo growing inside can suffer, but not everybody is confident that this is the case, so the best ethical option is to avoid consuming eggs, and campaign for the abolition of the egg industry because even if it manages to avoid the killing of males, it will still kill the females after a short life of suffering in the farms.
The egg industry is as deadly as the meat industry, so there is no justification for being ovo-vegetarian rather than vegan.
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