I think more people should keep chickens in back yards. They’re good pets, they recycle scrap foods and they keep insects off your veggies. Nobody should be buying cage eggs in the shops.
Its worth pointing out that there are methods for avoiding this, by detecting the male chicks when they're still essentially a foetus in the egg. These work so well that France, Germany and Italy banned culling chicks a few years back. Unfortunately they're more expensive than determining the chick's sex after they are hatched so other places don't do it.
Not necessary. https://www.soos.org.il/
I believe there are. The people buying the chickens for their lovely free range or backyard thing are specifically only buying female ones. The males get killed, usually in somewhat gruesome ways shortly after hatching.
That might not be an ethical problem for you but it is for me.
> On 18 July 2021, French Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, announced chick culling would be banned from 1 January 2022.[70] Both maceration and gassing will be prohibited, and the French government would grant chicken breeders subsidies of 10 million euros combined in order to acquire in-ovo sexing machines instead (leading to extra consumer costs of about 1 eurocent per box of six eggs).
Industrial farming use different breeds for egg-laying and meat, so they would find early culling more economical.