Posted on 05/21/2021 11:31:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
Germany has passed legislation that makes the culling of male chicks in the meat industry illegal from January 1, 2022. This makes Germany the first country to ban the mass slaughter of chicks by law.
The meat industry utilizes the products of chickens in two key approaches. One is to raise boiler chickens, females that will gain weight quickly and therefore are considered economically valuable for their meat. The others are egg layers, bred to churn out as many eggs as they can before being recategorized as soup chickens. It’s a system that calls for a lot of females with males only serving the purpose of fertilizing eggs. As such, male chickens are routinely culled shortly after hatching as they aren’t considered an economically viable choice.
In traditional chicken farming, when it comes to the male chicks, an approach to repurpose the young animals into low-quality feed has seen them shredded en masse in previous years. Germany is now leading the way out of this ethically questionable practice, making it illegal to carry out the mass culling of male chicks from next year.
Germany's Federal Administrative Court ruled in 2019 that animal welfare concerns outweighed the economic interests of the industry. Farmers will now have to use an innovative technology that can prevent male chicks from being born by sexing developing chicken eggs. The technique cuts a tiny hole in the shell of developing eggs and tests it for sex-dependent hormones. This way, developing males can be destroyed long before hatching, ending the unethical shredding practice that typically processes around 43 million chicks per year in Germany.
Yes.
“My understanding is these techniques work, but will increase the price of eggs by a few cents each.”
There are always unintended and sometimes serious consequences to anything a government decrees. For example, women can only get child support from the government if they are not married. Hence, some 70% (NPR.org) of black children are born out of wedlock. No government program or policy I’m aware of works without some serious negative consequences.
Now, chickens. Just one company I knew of in the United States harvests (are you ready?) twelve million chickens per day 360 days per year. (From my MBA class in 2005.) Chickens come to harvest weight in just six weeks. (Instead of one year, or 52 weeks.) This is due to genetic manipulation and chicken food full of estrogen.
Chicken is the cheapest meat anywhere and, in places like Italy, it is, for all practical purposes, the only meat most kids eat. Thus, it is “normal” for prepubescent Italian boys to have breasts. Sometimes, substantial breasts. This is due to the amount of estrogen required to bring a chicken to the optimum weight in the shortest time. Estrogen does not cook out.
So, what further manipulation intended to produce only female chickens will find its way into our food stocks and, what will be the impact? We may not realize for years that the ratio of male to female humans has changed, and, then it will take more years to discover what causes the change. Or, it could be something benign. It could be all males whose mothers consumed chicken while pregnant, will be born with blue eyes. The point is, the government experiments without even realizing they are experimenting.
They care about chickens and pig crates, but not stray cats or even people. If they cared about the homeless, they’d put them in institutions oriented towards helping them, or at least keep them from breaking up the fabric of our economies as they do now. So, why the one, chickens and not, say kittens or the homeless? It’s because their aim is to damage businesses as much as possible. There’s no way to do that with laws about cats. But, the reason they encourage homelessness, (what do you call providing free needles?) is, the homeless damage businesses. Simple as that.
“I’d rather pay a few cents more to prevent their development than shred them upon birth.”
I’m the same, but I’ve also never struggled to get food on the table.
This is one of those policies that is supported by the comfortable at a cost to lower income folk.
The chicks that live still end up as a chicken dinner, no?
Sooner or later.......................
Agree just raise the cockerels up for 120 days of so and harvest them for fryers.
We raise all our own meat on our farm, including 25-50 chickens (broilers) each year and currently have 180 egg layers, so I’m somewhat of an authority on the subject.
A chickens sex has nothing to do with it’s flavor. What makes a chicken suitable for meat is it’s size.
Do you eat year old roosters?
first it male chickens... listen up guys
Agreed.
I don’t get it.
Our male broilers are always bigger that the females. In fact, you can pay extra to get all male broilers instead of “straight run” just for that reason.
Probably Big Poultry just backing Karen groups to kill off smaller producers.
Alternatively a tiny hole can be cut in a young rooster to capnize/castrate him so he’ll grow fatter and bigger than a hen. Such birds are called capons.
Yes.
Germany has passed legislation that makes the culling of male chicks in the meat industry illegal from January 1, 2022.
= = =
So when will they want to monitor the sex of the flies I swat?
For “Equality”, you know.
Do they cull them if the little roostrs identify as female?
What if the chick self-identifies as a hen?.................
I wouldn’t try milking one of them.
Old ones are good in gumbo.
when I read the ingredients of something like nuggets it says “chicken breast with rib meat” and I wonder why rib meat is included.
I wouldn’t try breeding them either..................
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