Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

is the consumer vote necessary? it seems like producers might appreciate saving 50% on feeding chicks

Male chicks are not feed nor raised but rather fed into a device quite similar to a wood chipper shortly áfter birth. You can read more about it here [1] or find some quite graphic videos on YouTube. This is addressed in the article:

"In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive)."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

yeah I'm aware of male culling.

"10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs"

I really didn't see that one coming.

Yeah I got whiplash from my head snapping back to read that again

There was also that time when a milk company wrote the names of the cows who produced the milk on the cartons and some feminist complained that all the names were female.

is it an urban legend, or do you have reference for that?

One of the Minecraft mods makes you actually do the video game equivalent (thus not over the correct time period) of how we actually get milk. Instead of just right click on any cow with a bucket (like vanilla Minecraft) that mod requires you to find a boy cow and a girl cow, ensure they're both happy (well fed, no nearby predators etc.), and after a short period nature takes its course and you get a baby cow. Next, steal the baby cow, you can kill it for food or just move it to somewhere mum can't reach it. She's recently given birth so her body will make milk but now there's no baby to drink it, so you can steal the milk.

I think 10% of people probably just say things for their own internal amusement. I have to think there's some overlap with the people who draw penises or write or write "jokes" in bathroom stalls.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant

They don't feed male chicks - from the first paragraph:

> in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year, typically by methods such as maceration (being ground up alive).

but they'd save on incubating the eggs which they could otherwise use or sell.

I suppose that is true. But I imagine that the scale of egg incubation to produce hens is a relatively small portion of total egg production, since each hen produces many eggs. You'd probably have to compare the cost of incubating an egg and the labor to manually sex the chick to the per-egg cost of this technology. I would be surprised if that comes out in favor of the in-egg-sexing tech right now, but it would be great if it did.

They don't feed them. They grind them up alive then use the resulting slush to feed to other things.

what do those chicks eat? IIUC they aren't sexed immediately after hatching? Maybe I'm wrong.

Sexing is typically done immediately after hatching, yes.

> In-ovo sexing is still at the beginning stages of its rollout, and while it has become substantially cheaper since it became available 7 years ago, it still adds a few cent per dozen to the production cost of eggs.

I’m sure we’ll get there but for now it costs more.

They don't feed the males - they just kill them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com