Eggs are big business. Each of those eggs comes from a chicken. One of these is roughly 21 million layer hens across the country. Each one is bred specifically for egg production. But of course, only female chickens lay eggs. Wonder what happens to male chicks born into the egg industry?
Over the years, the chicken industry has developed two very different breeds of chicken; “layers”, bred to lay eggs; and meat chicken also known as ” broilers” bred to grow as much flesh as possible.
Male layer chicks don’t grow large enough to be sold for meat and farms considered them financially worthless. So, the egg industry does the only thing that makes economic sense to them: they killed baby chickens more than 12 million of them in a year, usually on their first day of life.
The egg industry uses two main methods to kill chicks. The first is gassing chambers. Which renders chicks unconscious using carbon dioxide. The other method of killing, which the industry considers most efficient, is called maceration. Along with gassing, maceration is used across all egg production systems; cages, barn-laid, free-range and organic. It’s also what the industry does to millions of meat chicks that they consider “inviable”.
Every day in hatcheries thousands of male chicks are sorted from the females. They are then poured from crates onto conveyor belts. Shunted along, they bounce off the belt’s rails and each other. Finally, they drop off the edge of the belt and their bodies are torn apart by a metal grinder. All of this is legal and commonplace.
When the egg industry looks at these chicks, it doesn’t see the living, thinking, and feeling beings. It just seems an inconvenience to be dealt with.
At the end of the day, these are profit-driven industries that are trying to meet the demand for a product. As people buy more and more eggs, the egg industry finds ways to produce them as cheaply and efficiently as possible.
Creating machines to kill chicks en masse is the clinical result of this drive for efficiency. But there is a silver lining: We have the power to stop this. By choosing to eat fewer eggs, cutting them out altogether and using egg replacement instead we can reduce demand. This not only sends the message that the horrible practice of chick-shredding has to end, but it also prevents the violent deaths of millions of chicks.
