Every year the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so have little monetary value.That longtime practice is changing, thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up for other uses before they mature into chicks.
The system began operating this month in Iowa at the nation's largest chick hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day.“We now have ethically produced eggs we can really feel good about,” said Jörg Hurlin, managing director of Agri Advanced Technologies, the German company that spent more than a decade developing the SUV-sized machine that can separate eggs by sex.Even Americans who are careful to buy cage free or free range eggs typically aren't aware that hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed each year, usually when they are only a day old. Most of the animals are culled through a process called maceration that uses whirling blades to nearly instantly kill the baby birds — something that seems horrifying but that the industry has long claimed is the most humane alternative.“Does the animal suffer? No because it's instantaneous death. But it's not pretty because it's a series of rotating blades,” said Suzanne Millman, a professor at Iowa State University who focuses on animal welfare.Chick culling is an outgrowth of a poultry industry that for decades has raised one kind of chicken for eggs and another for meat. Egg-laying chickens are too scrawny to profitably be sold for meat, so the male chicks are ground up and used as additives for other products.It wasn't until European governments began passing laws that outlawed maceration that companies started puzzling out how to determine chicken sex before the chicks can hatc
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