In case some readers may not know, male chicks in the egg industry are literally ground and shredded alive. I won't direct link to videos because they are graphic, but you can easily find them online. Here is an indirect link:
I don't totally understand what's wrong with that. It doesn't seem like a particularly cruel way to kill an animal, it's an instant death isn't it? Is the resultant product just waste, or can it be put to good use? Edit: it seems it can be used as animal feed.
It feels like a distraction from thinking about fixing the way the hens get treated through their miserable lives.
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
This doesn't provide a distraction from other animal welfare issues, it fixes one of the many issues that exist while others are being solved. Whether or not male chicks are ground up, hens will still live horrible lives. The only option is to create lab-grown egg facilities and not involve any chickens at all, or eat plant-based replacements (which aren't all soy or Just egg, though those are both options).
IMO, we can't farm animals without exploitation and should rethink our food system, but it would be great if in the meantime, we stop breeding and killing all of these sentient animals as part of the egg industry.
What I mean is, this is the sort of issue that industry, politicians and special interest groups like to focus on, because it is easy to argue about and build an emotional case for and developing solutions won't change much about the status quo of the horrific conditions of mass poultry farming.
I agree with you, we need to totally rethink and replace the food system. I also think that the result of solving this particular issue won't reduce the aggregate suffering in the system - if, for example, the total number of chickens produced is half of before, but all chicks are ensured to be hens, then the chickens in aggregate will suffer proportionally more (in total days of suffering per chicken hatched) than if there was an even split of males and females being hatched - but it will provide something for the industry to point to as "improving" while nothing fundamentally changes. And eggs will probably become cheaper and people will eat more of them.
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
I guess, where I get confused is why grinding up baby male chicks is terrible, but letting chicks grow into adult-hood so we can kill them and eat their flesh is significantly...less bad I guess?
Why not just aim for the banning of killing any animal for any reason? Is it a specific "scale" problem? Killing 5 chickens or chicks is fine. But 100 is horrible? Is it 1000? 100,000? 1 million?
Letting them grow to adulthood while giving them an opportunity to experience a decent sort of "chicken existence" (i.e. able to indulge in natural chicken-like behaviours etc.) definitely seems preferable to just killing them at birth. But killing them at birth is definitely better than forcing them to stay alive in cruelly constrained/unnatural conditions. Better still is preventing their growth into baby male chickens (which presumably do have the capacity for pain/some sort of awareness of existence - as I noted in my other reply, can bond and interact with humans) in the first place.
> The only option is to create lab-grown egg facilities and not involve any chicks at all.
And after that, somebody would still try to convince us that eating spider eggs is murdering innocent spiderlings. Thanks but, not thanks. This spiral of nonsense must stop.
I think part of the issue is that as a society we moved too far away from what we are. I was raised on a farm. I saw chicken heads cut off and sheep slaughtered, but it was all done in.. what is the word I am looking for here.. in a non-industrial manner. You knew you were taking a life and you tried not to make it ( edit: unnecessarily ) painful and not a pointless sacrifice ( in western society anyway some ethos definitely developed over time ).
But buying a mcnugget at mcdonalds removes that clear connection between life and death.
<< It feels like a distraction from thinking about fixing the way the hens get treated through their miserable lives.
It is a distraction, but I believe it is a valid related point nonetheless.
In general, we're protected from the true costs of our decisions. It's not just consumption of animal products, but negative externalities generally. We're willing to accept terrible things when divorced from the consequences of our actions and, even when made aware of these consequences, we dismiss them to protect our conceptualization of ourselves as "good" people.
Not only is it much easier to raise animals in a more humane manner than is done industrially, when people live closer to their food source they understand the sheer amount of resources -- land, water, deforestaton -- that goes into every kilogram of meat. I think people would eat a more reasonable (i.e. a lot less, and healthier) amount of meat if they saw and experienced the impacts of meat farming first-hand, from cutting down trees to create land, treating the land for farming enough food for the animals to grow before you can kill them for meat -- rather than selecting "beef" on a food delivery app without thinking about anything.
I don't think the mass killing of billions of baby chicks should be justified because it's "an instant death". Just because there are other issues worth fixing doesn't mean it's a distraction, that's just a silly mindset. We should work on both problems.
What is the problem with killing billions of baby chicks? If killing billions of baby chicks means cheaper food for billions of people it's not only not a problem, it would be unethical to do otherwise.
It seems like you’re justifying the status quo when I think a much more practical answer would be to simply swap out the chickens for chickpeas or soy or any number of other high protein and cruelty free alternatives which would also almost positively be _way_ cheaper and less wasteful.
If people want to eat chickpeas or soy, they are free to do so. Similarly, if people want to eat cheap chicken, people who don't eat chicken shouldn't have any say into it.
I love the mentality of a lot of people. I feel like free market extremists would literally buy and sell anything from anyone in the world and be like 'listen, all I did was SELL nerve gas to the general, I never intended for him to use it on that ethnic minority group.'
There's a distinction, sure, but it's not infinite.
Would you shrug your shoulders and say "they're not humans" when confronted with an animal abuser torturing intelligent family pets? I hope not. The intelligence of some non-humans, like great apes, is pretty incontrovertible. People are familiar with the social and emotional capabilities of dogs, but pigs and cows are surprisingly similar.
On the other hand, would I get up on arms if you squished a mosquito, or if a starving person ate a fish? If you ate a tomato? Of course not, that's ridiculous.
Somewhere on that spectrum is a point where we can evaluate the morality and the utility of killing male chickens to make egg farming more profitable.
It's critical to allow society to understand that part of the system that produces eggs in sterile styrofoam packages for 99 cents is a shredder that turns chicks into cow feed. People who do not understand the food industry cannot make informed choices about what to consume, and people supplying that demand cannot be expected to universally buck incentives.
Yes, there's a distinction, but we obviously see non-human animals as being more similar to humans in terms our moral obligations than we do non-living matter, and generally the closer to being a human-like, the more we care about how we treat it. A baby chicken can literally bond to humans, follow us around, and interact with us in various ways. If that isn't enough to grant it as being deserving of ethical/humane treatment, I don't know what is.
I'm looking forward to them destroying the Earth with us on it to build an interstellar bypass, and then telling us that our feelings on the matter aren't important because we're lesser beings.
By this logic I could say that I am allowed to kill and hurt my dog if I want so, and people who don't like hurting dogs shouldn't have any say into it.
We could generalize this to all laws. Hey, if you don't want to do it, simply don't do it, but it's not your business whether I do.
Anyway, interesting how the discussion quickly moved from "billions of people are starving, it would be unethical not to..." to "...but they like the taste of chicken".
>If people want to eat chickpeas or soy, they are free to do so. Similarly, if people want to eat cheap chicken, people who don't eat chicken shouldn't have any say into it.
If people want to eat chickpeas or soy, they are free to do so. Similarly, if people want to eat cheap human flesh, people who don't eat human flesh shouldn't have any say in it.
Who are we to say the life of a chicken is less important than a human. That’s billions of chickens are needlessly killed simply because it is inconvenient to deal with them else wise when looking for egg laying chickens.
Well, let's say when I first learnt about this, I thought this concept of dumping living (and cute af) animals en masse into rotating blades was an idea only the sick heads of splatter movie authors could generate.
Apparently it's also economically very efficient and therefore real.
It might be less bad than the other things we do to animals, but it's still pretty horrifying. You could conclude we should give hens higher priority, but I'd say we should place more importance on reducing cruelty of all kinds.
It is less cruel sure, but in no ways moral or ethical considering the fact that humans directly influenced in the creation of these lives for no purpose other than instant killing.
You can't easily raise them for meat at scale like you can hens. Roosters are highly territorial and noisy. Nobody wants a chicken farm next door, but they sure as hell don't want a chicken farm with 100,000 roosters crowing and fighting with each other all day long.
Yes but the hens brought into this world and raised for meat or egglaying are eventually slaughtered. That's why they come into existence: because we want them to for that purpose.
The rate and quantity of the slaughter is pretty much 1:1 with the rate at which male chicks are disposed of. How is there any moral difference between expediently terminating male chicks, and taking 48 days before doing the same to hens?
> That's why they come into existence: because we want them to for that purpose.
That's humans' intentions not why they come into existense. Just like you and I did not come into the world simply because our parents decided to, animals also are born not because of but despite human intentions.
I was merely replying to that one statement. Morally, I am on the fence on this, but it might be better to let them loose into the wild where they can feed predators amd contribute to an ecosystem. For example wolves kill and endanger animals so they're hunted but chicken are easy to catch and feed upon. You still have to discard their dead bodies so whh not discard them live into the wild.
> And apparently in the EU the chicks have to be anesthesized before being sent to the grinder.
Do you know how that is done? The chicks are used as a source of protein, so I'm curious as to how they are anesthetized without making the result feed unusable.
Couldn't find the methods used in practice. But presumably it's electrocution or CO/CO2 poisoning (see the allowed methods in https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...) or I might have been wrong and shreddering may indeed be used on its own, but can't be bothered to research further.
Watch the movie Dominion if you’re interested in having your eyes opened as to just how cruel and gruesome factory farming is. Whatever you think is going on, it’s almost certainly orders of magnitude worse than you can imagine. The sheer scale of it boggles the mind.
As much as I dislike this practice, I can at least partially defend it by being as close to instant as possible. It does not make it any less upsetting, but, sadly, some animals suffer worse fates.
Also worth remembering that nature is a cruel mistress to animals herself. Heck, animals can be pretty cruel to other animals even if they don't kill them. Heck, animals can be cruel to their own species (see adult male bears happily devouring their young if possible).
We are bringing millions and billions of these animals to life. Stating that they face similar or worse fate in nature is not realistic as they wouldn’t exist in the first place.
There is a limit to the amount of upset one can feel before it either becomes debilitating or certain sub-conscious self-preservation mechanisms kick in and dial down the empathy.
Unbelievable cruelties are happening all over the world at this very second. All of them are bad, and trying to grade them is a grotesque affair with no good outcome. If I tried to subject myself to upset over all of them, I'd do nothing but sink into non-stop depression.
I propose a charitable reading of parent: they are upset about the practice and don't condone or support it in any way, but when it comes to some ladder of priorities in solving the most dire issues of the world, there are sadly bigger cruelties committed on animals than this. All of it needs solving, but given limited resources we still need to (sadly) pick the bigger evil?
> There is a limit to the amount of upset one can feel before it either becomes debilitating or certain sub-conscious self-preservation mechanisms kick in and dial down the empathy.
I wouldn't personally say the chicken grinder gets anywhere near the level of debilitating upset. I'm easily more upset by very poor housing for farm animals, for example.
> Unbelievable cruelties are happening all over the world
> some ladder of priorities
But the comparison wasn't to other issues in the world by my reading. It was specifically about how this machine works versus what someone's initial impression might be.
My interpretation was that "It" referred to the previous sentence about it being close to instant. If "It" was talking about other animals, then I retract my comment.
Don't think there would be an ethical problem with that; it's instantaneous and probably less prone to error than injections. But the optics aren't quite as good.
I don't think it's instantaneous, though it would be fast. Whirring metal blades can only spin so fast, and a human-size grinder would be much larger than a chick-sized one, so it wouldn't be able to spin as fast. Also, assuming you drop the human into the blades feet-first, just using normal gravity, there's going to be some amount of time between the feet getting ground up and the head. Whether this is perceptible to the doomed, I guess would require some calculations involving nerve conduction speed.
Egg laying chickens (layers) are very different from meat chickens (broilers). Layers have been bred to be lean and put their calorie surplus into producing eggs. Broilers have been bred to pack on weight as quickly and efficiently as possible. No one eats layer chickens they are usually turned into compost or pet food.
Source: My wife manages +100K birds on one of the largest egg farms in the US
Chicken breeds used by commercial operations are highly optimised for either meat or egg production. Hobby or specialist farmers might do as you describe, often with more general-purpose breeds, but it usually isn't worth raising a layer breed bird for meat.
as I understand, male chickens are aggressive and really hard to raise. they fight and destroy one another when kept at the density that industrial processes would like to keep them at. And I don't think the meat is very good or desirable.
Not defending any of this, just saying there's a rationale and twisted incentives to do this twisted things we do
There are separate breeds of chickens raised for eggs and meat. Male layers can't compete with meat chickens, growing >2x slower, and are mostly worthless apart from the few roosters needed to breed the next generation of layers.
> What Cinnamon and his team determined revolves around the common denominator of all male chickens, the Z chromosome from the mother hen.
This would also be a common denominator with the female chickens. Birds, unlike mammals, use the ZW sex-chromosome system, where males have the symmetric ZZ chromosomes and females have a pair of asymmetric ZW chromosomes.
I'd like to know more about this, such as a general description of what kind of change they made, as this article is really light on technical details.
The maternal Z is not a common denominator of female chickens. Female chickens have a Z chromosome from the sperm and males have one each from the sperm and the egg. For a laying hen to have a female offspring, it has to pass on a W. Therefore, if you make the mother hen's ovary produce eggs with a lethal z, but a non-lethal W, normal sperm will produce viable ZW females and Zz males with a lethal mutation.
Wait, I thought this was already a solved problem? We've been able to determine the sex of chicken eggs from the outside using lasers for quite a few years now. [0]
Just like better batteries and non-lithium batteries, this seems to be an issue that has been solved numerous times in the last decade without broad application of the solution.
IMO, genetic modification is less humane than grinding the male chicks. In any case, the breeders for the egg layers likely already have logistics in place for the ground baby chicks (pet food, fertilizer, etc) which is likely easier to process than aborted eggs. Since the eggs will presumably be incubated, they won't be human consumable, and how you have an additional waste stream to work with.
Every single laying chicken also dies or gets killed in industrialized farms (indeed, all living things on Earth die eventually), and it's likely a less-instantaneous process than the rooster grinder.
It seems there’s sometimes an arms race in the comments section here to see who can produce the edgiest, most contrarian point the fastest. I’m waiting for the one that says extended, lifelong torture is actually healthy for the animals.
> Their concept was to introduce the gene that halts the embryogenesis to the Z chromosome, in order to stop the creation of male chicks at the stage when they are only a microscopic cluster of cells.
> “We’re making a genetic modification that segregates only to the males and is perfectly validated,” said Cinnamon.
Framed as “gene editing to prevent male cell genesis” to make this happen, there’s going to be plenty of people that refuse to eat these eggs.
Considering all the times science has made mistakes historically up unto now, I say it is their right to not eat them if they so choose. My parents still haven't forgiven "fat makes you fat."
For the last past years (at least 2) I've been eating eggs which comes from farms which do not kill the males.
Don't know exactly how they do it, but the possibility is available. They are more expensive, but if you feel is not ok to kill them...
That's not the "traditional solution", capons are something different entirely. These are egg laying breeds, they aren't considered worth raising for meat.
But that has to do with the specialization via breeding more than it has to do with anything intrinsic. We raise dual purpose chickens on a hobby basis, and I understand that, yes, this would not be acceptable on an industrial/commercial scale, but that says more about that kind of market, that kind of farming & the way consumers are insulated from the affects of it than it does about the quality of the birds or the meat.
In other words, yet again, the true externalities are not always exposed to the consumer.
EDIT: I should mention I am also fully in favour of things like this genetic engineering work that could provide a larger scale solution assuming they can be done humanely. Same for male dairy cows.
Not quite a century ago, a couple of my uncles raised & sold capons in a small rural American town. It was a side business, male chicks were ~free, and they did the caponization themselves.
It's a bit spooky to see Israel of all countries looking into anything birth-related. I would prefer to see this come out of literally any other country. Furthermore, doesn't this raise the same concerns as we had with the genetically-altered dud mosquitos released to slow the mosquito population (and disease proliferation)? The mosquitos that ended up having unforeseen consequences?
Israel cares more about birth counts than virtually any other country in the world by virtue of their relationship with the Palestinians. The Palestinians are rapidly approaching the tipping point where they will outnumber Israelis. At that time, it's possible that Israel would have to renegotiate which country controls which regions.
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+male+chicks+grinder&...