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.
“Farmers will now have to use an innovative technology that can prevent male chicks from being born by sexing developing chicken eggs.”
My understanding is these techniques work, but will increase the price of eggs by a few cents each.
Chick abortions?
We’re gonna kill the old red rooster when she comes................
And the protein will still be sold and used
Another weird trick dreamed up by Vegans to make raising poultry much more expensive? All of a sudden, someone is so terribly concerned about the plight of the male chickadee.
Ping!...........................
I don’t like seeing videos of male chickens being thrown into shredders. I’d rather pay a few cents more to prevent their development than shred them upon birth.
Will chickens lay eggs if there’s no rooster around? Just askin’.
It’s still “ok” to abort children on the basis of “wrong sex” however.
Lord a mercy people are just crazy nuts! I hatch out chicks by the dozen and I cull the roosters as I have pure bred roosters and do not need anymore as Roosters serve two purposes, Security and Breeding...otherwise they are dead weight.
If a chicken wants to call himself a rooster, who am I to question?
Three purposes.
They go well with dumplings...................
And down the road when it turns out the same chemicals make human males infertile does it mean we all get to sue farms AND the biotech firms?
News to me. I raised a batch of meat birds and the males are always about a pound heavier and there's no reason to cull them. They don't get old enough to get tough and sex makes no difference in taste. Maybe it's a European thing.
I think it is...................
male chickens are eatable. You just have to cook them when they are around 3 months old. After that they are really only good for dog food or Campbells chicken soup.
Male dairy cows are similar. They are used for veal or sausage.
Male dairy cows?
Are they transgender?.................
All chickens taste purty good........
Why not just use male chickens for nuggets or collagen?
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