They're usually shredded alive almost immediately because they're seen as "waste" since they don't lay eggs
For some more context:
I have been seeing a lot of animal abuse posts on here lately. I hadn't noticed 196 being like that in the past on here or Reddit. Is there a trend toward that for this community in general? I'm well aware of how fucked the industry is, but I also don't sub to this community for that. I am here for little gay people shit posting in my phone. These just make me sad. I can't personally do anything to stop this. I don't want to unsub, and there's not a great way to filter, unless it's all the same OP? :(
You can go vegan and stop giving these people money
this won't stop the fact it'll keep happening and keep making people sad
Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.
This is emphatically untrue. If you eat a few hundred fewer animals over the course of your life, that's a few hundred animals saved (even if supply and demand aren't perfectly elastic, the expected utility is 1-to-1). The fact that billions will still die is irrelevant.
Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?
Couldn't that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn't going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.
If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you'll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!
The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It's going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable
And with systematic action, it's still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We're going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption
The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there's been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
Yeah, you should go vegan, and also post depressing memes on 196 that make all the carnists feel guilty. That'll have a bigger impact.
I can't personally do anything to stop this.
You can always upvote or share a post like this to spread awaraness and hence maybe make people buy less eggs, or at least make them pause to think before they buy their next eggs.
Trolls found out they can post here with impunity, so they do so.
Pretty sure it's mostly the one poster
That's only in industrial egg production. If you're a local farmer and you need to dispose of the males, your go to quick and painless option might be a potato sack or your hands.
Industrial egg production is the vast majority of egg production. Using the word only there is perhaps a bit misleading when for instance, 98.2% of US egg production is from factory farms [1]
I'm not sure one can call any of those methods painless either
The industry is slowly evolving away from it tho. I've seen "no chick killing" or something similar on labels in German shops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html
The technology for it that currently does not scale to higher egg consumption rather well among other potential problems
They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.
[…]
One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling
Culling unhatched eggs seems less cruel to me than culling <1 day hatchlings. Cute-bias, I know.
Seems to scale somewhat in Europe, talking many many millions of eggs per year too.
At least trying is better than nothing.
Not saying it's perfect, but tech is advancing thought it would be interesting to add that to this thread...
That is because it got forbidden. They never would do something that lessens their profit without being forced to do it.
maybe, but you can’t feed a population on backyard farms. If everybody wants to eat eggs, there has to be a massive production, and it will be this kind of hell. The only logical way to prevent this is to stop treating animals as resources. We are perfectly able to feed with plants, we know how to get every necessary nutrient. Animal agriculture needs to stop, and if we’re truly leftists, we have to stand against any exploitation. How could we evolve as a society if we continue to use sentient beings as mere resources?
this has been your daily vegan post.
I raised mine to roosters. I got a grey cock, a brown cock, and the biggest is my black cock.
Dumb question maybe, but why not just let them get older and then eat them?
I had this same question, I learned "meat" chickens are called broiler chickens, they were bred to put on weight rapidly. Egg laying chickens are separate breed and grow slower or won't grow to the size of a broiler. The industry is limited by containment footage, so they wouldn't use a male egg laying chick where they could house a broiler.
This is really unfortunate. I see the size of chicken breasts these days, and it's silly. Our society is very wasteful.
The industry kills them right away because they're not selectively breeded to grow as fast as broilers do. Egg laying chicken have been selectively bred to lay high quantities of eggs instead
Due to modern selective breeding, laying hen strains differ from meat production strains (broilers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
As an aside, in both cases, the selective breeding has led to all kinds of health issues for these birds. Broilers can hardly walk due to being fast-growing. Egg laying chickens have all kind of bone health problems due to producing lots of eggs (takes a lot of calcium to produce an egg shell)
They're totally different breed designed to lay as much eggs as physically possible compared to broilers that are designed to grow edible muscle as much and as fast as possible.
More info here.
Because we like big chicken breasts and we cannot lie.
(Male chickens of egg-laying breeds don't have as much meat, and also the males left together often compete and can try to kill each other. You'd want around a dozen hens per rooster, compared to roughly 1:1 that would come out naturally with eggs, and have enough space for each to call their own).
Roosters are very aggressive and territorial and wouldn't just chill with homies.
plus Cock Meat is an awkward marketing phrase for some.
Don't they gender the eggs now? They just don't hatch the male ones.
AS far AS i know, there are experiments with identifying the gender in the egg, but it isn't practically usable on a big scale. I might be wrong, would love if someone knew more about this.
I mean shredding males to nuggets is also financially viable.
Haven't really seen it mentioned here, but for those who don't know, the male chicks are not used for chicken nuggets, but primarily for pet food or plant fertilizer. Also not every country does this practice. Not only that, but eliminating eggs from the human global diet would be unfeasible. This is because eggs are the best source of protein, with only whey protein coming second. They are also the only food with such a high protein content that also contains all essential nutrients. And before someone posts "but da beans!" - no, they're not on the same level. Although beans are a good source of protein, they're neither complete nor are they actually as high as they seem, because the protein they have isn't as bioavailable as that of eggs (speaking of, this is why there's certain practices in vegan diets to gain more nutrients, such as eating leafy greens with an acid to get more iron or soaking pecans to remove the pyric acid in them to absorb the minerals they have better).
Removing eggs from the world diet would actually lead to more ecological harm, even without more ethical chicken rearing practices becoming wider spread, because the amount of farm land needed to ensure proper nutrition for everyone with a mixed vegetable diet would be significantly higher than ensuring there's just enough eggs for everyone.
You don't like baby chicks getting ground up? Don't own carnivorous pets, and buy from more ethical egg farmers. Or if you can, honestly just get your own chicken or 2. You'll have enough eggs with even a single chicken to be honest. Hens don't need much space, males can be eaten once their 4am crowing drives you crazy - although they do keep the hens happy. If you can afford it or don't have very particular diet restrictions, go vegan - you probably don't need as much protein as you think. I used to be vegan until kidney failure, and now with a transplant am back to mostly vegetarian (at least for now until I can go back to being fully vegan). I also used to raise animals for food and farm because I came from a poor family initially. If you don't care, then just consider eating less meat and eggs will ya? Too much ain't good for your health either. Plus it'll taste better if you don't eat it every day. A weekend bbq is way more special when you haven't had meat the prior everyday.
Lil' nuggets => McNuggets
To shreds you say? How's his mother holding up?
To tendies you say
Never understood this. Why not raise the roosters for their meat and feathers and leave the hens for laying eggs?
I presume, like everything else wrong with Capitalism, it comes down to cost. It's more cost efficient somehow. I don't understand the details, because I'm not a chicken farmer, but I have been in the capitalism machine for a long, long time, and I'd bet a shitton of tax payer money that it's purely down to cost.
If it saves $0.02 per chicken, they'll gladly poison the rivers, oceans, lakes, etc. with refuse and baby chick corpses.
I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.
So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.
Vegans when you don't listen to them
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.