usernamesAreTricky
JusticeForPorygonIndustrial 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
US Factory Farming Estimates
How many animals are factory farmed? We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 74.9% of cows, 98.6% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.3% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition. Land animal figures use data from the USDA Census of Agriculture and EPA definitions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.
The industry is slowly evolving away from it tho. I’ve seen “no chicken killing” or something similar on labels in German shops.
The technology for it that currently 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
Culling unhatched eggs seems less cruel to me than culling <1 day hatchlings. Cute-bias, I know.
Seems to scale somewhat in Europe, talking many many millions of eggs per year too.
At least trying is better than nothing.
Not saying it’s perfect, but tech is advancing thought it would be interesting to add that to this thread…
Lileath
alx
SchmooChickens 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.
LucidlethargyWasteful of what, though?
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.
More info here.
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).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
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)
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).
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Riven
Match!!
Skullgrid?
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.
jabathekek
CubitOom
pewgar_seemsimandroid
Uriel238 [all pronouns]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.
They don’t scale super well at the moment. See my comment elsewhere about just that
driving_crooner
Fredselfish
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆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.
Fugtig FiskI am guessing, only based on the fact that the immorally fast growing chickens only make a few more cents, that they are not profitable.
Also I am not sure if roosters can be kept together past a certain point maybe?
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.
littlecoltI can’t personally do anything to stop this.
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.
“i don’t want to see shit like this”
“you can upvote it so more people see shit like this as well”
thanks, very cool