Tech aims to block hatching of billions of male chicks fated for culling (2021)
huminnpoultry.com
huminnpoultry.com
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+male+chicks+grinder&...
It feels like a distraction from thinking about fixing the way the hens get treated through their miserable lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Humans, WE - are - humans.
Apparently it's also economically very efficient and therefore real.
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.
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?
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.
Chicks are not mammals, and chicks are not humans
> 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.
After raising chickens myself, the little goblins are smarter than they appear.
It's still honestly kinda cruel that we profit on and proliferate their species at the expense of immediate death for half their population.
The output isn't wasted, it's where the chicken in cat food comes from.
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 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.
Or, to word it the other way around, how it wouldn't be more upsetting if it was slow.
Is that line hyperbole so you don't sound callous?
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?
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.
<< It does not make it any less upsetting, but, sadly, some animals suffer worse fates.
My interpretation: It is upsetting. Some things are more upsetting ( for example, your example of it being more upsetting if it was slow ).
I am not sure if your characterization of my comment is fair or accurate.
There are far far far more important animal welfare issues to worry about.
But it doesn’t seem like we’re worrying about those all that much…
Not defending any of this, just saying there's a rationale and twisted incentives to do this twisted things we do
Source: My wife manages +100K birds on one of the largest egg farms in the US
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.
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.
If you specifically mean parthenogenesis to a male egg, then yes you'd generally need something like ZW.
[0]: https://physicsworld.com/a/laser-spectroscopy-determines-sex...
Graduates of the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School is about 99.7% accurate @ every 3-4 seconds. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jobs-chickens-idUSTRE67U0...
[2] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/eier-produktion-sinnloses-ku... (German)
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.
> “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.
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.
If not then it's not really a 'solution'.
Note that a healthy hen contributes eggs to several years of meals. Vs. a capon only graces the table once.
said Cinnamon. “Chickens are the most important organism in world,
And I just do not agree with that statement.
A big chunk of Israel startups and tech is focused on agriculture, this is one more on the list.