lefixxx ,

Don't they gender the eggs now? They just don't hatch the male ones.

littlecolt ,
@littlecolt@lemm.ee avatar

I have been seeing a lot of animal abuse posts on here lately. I hadn't noticed 196 being like that in the past on here or Reddit. Is there a trend toward that for this community in general? I'm well aware of how fucked the industry is, but I also don't sub to this community for that. I am here for little gay people shit posting in my phone. These just make me sad. I can't personally do anything to stop this. I don't want to unsub, and there's not a great way to filter, unless it's all the same OP? :(

debil ,

I 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.

thatsTheCatch ,

Pretty sure it's mostly the one poster

MindTraveller ,

You can go vegan and stop giving these people money

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Never understood this. Why not raise the roosters for their meat and feathers and leave the hens for laying eggs?

Tyfud ,

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.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

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.

John_McMurray ,

That's a lie. Old chickens are tough, usually only egg laying breeds get old. "Egg laying" varieties are not tough at basic maturity. Taste better too, than the commercial meat breeds. I'm specifically getting chicken wings from egg laying breeds because the skin is thicker and crisps up better than fast growth meat breeds (run a bar)

nucleative ,

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.

driving_crooner ,
@driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br avatar

Did they use the chickens for something? I guess cat food or something like that would be useful.

Fredselfish ,
@Fredselfish@lemmy.world avatar

Chicken nuggets are made this way.

Etterra ,

I acknowledge that food is cruel. Plants scream when you cut them, you just can't hear it. There are animals that kill their food by suffocation, drowning, spinal damage, being dismembered, impaling, and worst of all, the trauma of being devoured alive. Nature is cruel, humans are no different. We've just centralized the production and distribution.

All that said, I don't think we should make them live in cruel conditions. Let them go outside and walk around while they grow up before you take a pneumatic hammer to their skulls ffs.

lseif ,

i dont mind

IrateAnteater ,

Dumb question maybe, but why not just let them get older and then eat them?

CaptDust ,

I had this same question, I learned "meat" chickens are called broiler chickens, they were bred to put on weight rapidly. Egg laying chickens are separate breed and grow slower or won't grow to the size of a broiler. The industry is limited by containment footage, so they wouldn't use a male egg laying chick where they could house a broiler.

debil ,

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.

usernamesAreTricky OP ,

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).

https://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)

Num10ck ,

Roosters are very aggressive and territorial and wouldn't just chill with homies.

plus Cock Meat is an awkward marketing phrase for some.

LinkOpensChest_wav ,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

My dad has had pet chickens for decades, and his roosters always chill. They're highly intelligent animals. If you give them lots of vegetation and space and provide for their basic needs and well-being, they don't really get too aggressive.

Riven ,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Yea see that's the problem right there. No of these companies provide any of that to their chickens.

LinkOpensChest_wav ,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It's not profitable to do so. Capitalism is relentless and soulless.

WldFyre ,

There's no way socialism would provide that either on the scale that the Western world consumes chickens. We should still go vegan in a socialist economy.

LinkOpensChest_wav ,
@LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Oh I fully agree. Same in an anarchist community.

JusticeForPorygon ,
@JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world avatar

That's only in industrial egg production. If you're a local farmer and you need to dispose of the males, your go to quick and painless option might be a potato sack or your hands.

usernamesAreTricky OP ,

Industrial 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

freebee ,

The industry is slowly evolving away from it tho. I've seen "no chick killing" or something similar on labels in German shops.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html

usernamesAreTricky OP ,

The technology for it that currently does not 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

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling

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