I suppose it's slightly more animal friendly. On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines. Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment. Working towards one final giant culling of all unnaturally engineered animals and just continuing on with a small number of animals to live reasonably natural lives and produce goods for realistic, high, prizes to be consumed as a luxury or exotic thing. Sorry, I'm a dreamer I guess, continuously disappointed by a world that doesn't seem to be able to set any significant goals nor pursue them at large scale unless it's for profit and likely at the cost of the rest of the world.
There’s a moral difficulty here where western societies care a lot about the beginnings of things and can’t stomach things ending, as if the only desirable world is one in which we all experience immortal bliss until the heat death of the universe.
Every living thing exists by consuming other living things in some way or another. Every living thing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most animals are at least in small ways, consumers of animals.
There is moral value in striving to maximize the quality of life in all its stages, that does not necessarily have to exclude death for a purpose.
Everything dies whether by accident, disease, predation, of degradation by age. Thinking things were better off not existing or better off dying of organ failure instead of being eaten doesn’t always make sense to me.
I think this just depends on your values and moral code, and there's no clear right or wrong here.
I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan" as the only solution, or even necessarily a desirable one. But getting into a meat vs. no meat debate here isn't ever going to be productive, so that's all I'll say.
I had not known that male chicks are killed after birth in such numbers, and the practice does make me sad. But I also recognize that a lot of people just don't have any kind of emotional response to this sort of thing, and that's ok too. It's great that people are building new technologies to allow us to keep doing what we're doing, but with better treatment of the animals involved, and less waste.
In terms of animal protein, aren't eggs basically optimized food machines? For more efficiency, one would have to go down to insects with better conversion ratio.
> Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment.
There is increasingly more of that all the time.
> On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines.
Another step? They aren't getting any more optimized, if anything new available options are scaling that back in favor of more land-use, open space, slower growth.
> Sorry, I'm a dreamer I guess, continuously disappointed by a world that doesn't seem to be able to set any significant goals nor pursue them at large scale unless it's for profit and likely at the cost of the rest of the world.
You're free to consume whatever you want.
EDIT: my opening sentence is not fair. But it invited a lot of response. That can walk a thin line but in this case I figure it worked out. If my post were purely inflammatory, then it would be counter-productive but I don't see it that way.
> nor pursue them at large scale unless it's for profit
You, as a consumer, directly dictate to companies what is profitable and what's not by what you choose to buy and what you choose not to buy. Dichotomy of profit and ethics doesn't make any sense: profit is a signal which among other things also includes information about what consumers think if ethical or unethical, and how important it is to them.
The chickens we raise on our hobby farm are "dual purpose" birds in that they are good for both meat and eggs. That is traditionally how all poultry was raised, really, on family farms, etc. Roosters were raised and fattened until a few months in, and then slaughtered and eaten, while a portion of the hens were kept for laying. The meat from roosters isn't as good, but it's frankly fine overall.
There's no reason the meat industry couldn't divert the male chickens into a separate supply chain where they were raised until 6-8 months and then slaughtered and sold as stewing meat or some other (decent tasting) protein product for human consumption. The roosters don't develop aggressive behaviours until much later.
But that would be inefficient by market measures. So it doesn't happen.
I started this year with a couple dozen chickens, a motley crew of heritage breeds. Our (formerly 3) roosters definitely started showing aggression before 6 months. Furthermore, the repeated mounting of the hens is pretty abusive - chicken sex, I'm sorry to say, is pretty much rape.
That said, as you noted, on an industrial scale you would separate the roosters. But it's not clear that there's any market at all for rooster meat. Chicken meat is incredibly cheap and adds surprisingly little margin above the main input cost - feed. Roosters consume just as much feed but produce a lesser quantity of inferior meat. The margins are likely to be negative.
It's an efficiency story yes, but of the "you'll go bankrupt with this idea" sort.
We found that the dual purpose breeds were pretty mediocre at both purposes. Not great at laying eggs, and scrawny birds when prepared. When we switched to egg layer breeds our egg harvest was substantially larger. I never did try to raise meat birds.
> There's no reason the meat industry couldn't divert the male chickens into a separate supply chain...
I assume that that cost of an egg for a broiler chicken is less than the price delta for fewer pounds of worse meat that takes longer to produce, so it's still more cost effective to accept the male chicks as a sunk cost and move on.
I've been buying no-kill eggs for years now, there are plenty of egg distributors that hatch two-use chickens, the males grow large enough to be edible, the females lay eggs. Available for years.
I really don't see an advantage of this technology for the consumer, the real advantage lies with the producers.
I am by far not an animal rights activst and enjoy my daily portion of meat and dairy, but shreddering millions of male chicks always struck me als plain wrong, even by my carnivorian standards. This is progress that I fully support and I would not mind paying a little(!) extra to make sure that for my scrambled eggs no male chicken are shreddered.
So, they're still culling fertilized eggs with males, they just do it before they hatch now. I guess it's a little more visually appealing to the public, but it literally changes nothing. The same number of chickens are still culled, they still get turned into animal feed.
Honestly, what difference does it really make if male chickens are shredded and ground up into feed pre or post hatching? It's the same result in the end.
People almost universally feel that infanticide is wrong.
Abortion for whatever reason is easier for people to stomach.
Basically it's easier for people to feel good about preventing an embryo from turning into a cute little baby than it is for them to immediately kill that cute little baby once it's born.
It's a bit less horrific... the line between egg and birth is a clear line between brutalizing an organism capable of feeling pain and one that might not have reached that point (depending on how close to hatching it is).
To everyone who keeps bringing up that creatures eating each other is simply nature, the way things have always worked for eons:
We are not simply just eating animals.
In nature there is an equilibrium; every prey has a chance to escape. If an species cannot avoid predators, that species ceases to exist.
In our world there is no such merciful release.
We force millions of creatures to be born and live their entire lives in cramped squalid conditions only to be butchered off, sometimes for no good reason at all. [0][1]
This is cool, but doesn't seem like it would scale. When I say scale, I mean farms with a few hundred to a few thousand bird operation, good luck affording this machine. When the article says scale, they mean being able to do this with millions of eggs on an industrial feedlot. Trying to make industrial farming ethical is like trying to make fossil fuels not harmful to the environment.
This is a completely automated process, and the algorithm is "embarrassingly parallel". It's cheaper, of course, to merely sex the chicks and grind up the males, but there are a lot of ways to handle that, from charging extra to simply mandating a switch to this process.
Small-scale farms could pool the purchase of the egg processor, or buy their chicks instead of breeding them, and the price of any industrial process goes down fairly predictably over time. I'm just not seeing what you're seeing here.
> Instead, a laser beam burns a 0.3mm-wide hole in the shell. Then, air pressure is applied to the shell exterior, pushing a drop of fluid out of the hole. The process takes one second per egg and enables fluid to be collected from eggs without touching them.
This seems counterintuitive. If the external pressure is equally applied around the egg, what forces the fluid to escape?
That's a good question! I think you're correct that if the increase in external pressure were uniform around the whole egg, it would not push fluid out of the pinhole.
Looking at this 2020 video[0], it seems like the procedure might be:
1) Laser burns pinhole through shell.
2) Robotic pipette applies the marker chemical onto pinhole.
3) Pneumatic grabber picks up egg by its pinhole end (so the atmospheric pressure, relatively higher than the pressure inside the grabber, is pushing a little fluid out).
4) Egg is stored so marker chemical can be read later after it has undergone its reaction.
I found a 2018 video as well[1], but the machine looks a lot different and it's harder to tell how it works.
It's very strange to kill male chicks, I'm eating capon instead of regular chicken nowadays because it has much more flavor and a better bite. If people would simply eat them more they also don't have to be killed. Castration is not super animal friendly though.
I continually struggle with the fact that, while I don't find eating animals morally wrong when treated and killed humanly, I don't think I could kill an animal myself.
I had no idea male chicks were disposed. As a vegetarian, I understand humans killing animals for food(people have done this for generations). At the end of the day we share a huge amount of DNA with other animals (so we're a lot like other animals that eat other animals to stay alive).
It's nice that someone figured out a way to optimize this and reduce unnecessary death. Massive kudos to them.
I've been raised to think: "what if there was a higher species of Aliens that farmed humans for their meat?" Yeah I definitely wouldn't want those aliens to kill me just because I'm male.
Well, not killing the egg, but killing the developing chick inside the egg.
But you're right, it's just killing the chick earlier in its lifecycle, before it hatches. Analogous to aborting a human while in the womb, versus killing it shortly after birth.
I was wondering what happens to the (hopefully) very small amount male chicks that still hatch because no testing is free from false positives/negatives.
The good news is, according to section 5.2.4 of the the "respeggt System Manual"[1] they are forbidden to kill earlier than 12 weeks old.
I've seen the videos of the male chickens who go straight into the grinder on hatching, but what happens then? Does it get turns into feed or some other useful product?
Given that this article is from 2018 - does anyone know if this spread to other countries in the mean time? (And for bonus points: to the Netherlands?)
According to their website (which is also available in dutch [1]), outside of Germany they're only available in Paris and Jumbo supermarkets in the Netherlands.
[+] [-] difosfor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
Every living thing exists by consuming other living things in some way or another. Every living thing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most animals are at least in small ways, consumers of animals.
There is moral value in striving to maximize the quality of life in all its stages, that does not necessarily have to exclude death for a purpose.
Everything dies whether by accident, disease, predation, of degradation by age. Thinking things were better off not existing or better off dying of organ failure instead of being eaten doesn’t always make sense to me.
[+] [-] kelnos|5 years ago|reply
I personally do not see a problem with using animals as food. If that's good enough for all the other omnivores and carnivores in the food chain, it's good enough for humans. There are certainly a lot of problems with the sustainability and humane-ness of our livestock farming, but I don't see "become vegetarian/vegan" as the only solution, or even necessarily a desirable one. But getting into a meat vs. no meat debate here isn't ever going to be productive, so that's all I'll say.
I had not known that male chicks are killed after birth in such numbers, and the practice does make me sad. But I also recognize that a lot of people just don't have any kind of emotional response to this sort of thing, and that's ok too. It's great that people are building new technologies to allow us to keep doing what we're doing, but with better treatment of the animals involved, and less waste.
[+] [-] HighlandSpring|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corndoge|5 years ago|reply
For what purpose?
[+] [-] chrisjarvis|5 years ago|reply
"If not you, then who?" - Hillel, first- century Jewish scholar
"would you like some cheese with that whine?" - my mom
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
> Would be more interested in seeing more means of producing tasty food without using animals and at reduced costs to the environment.
There is increasingly more of that all the time.
> On the other hand it just seems like another step into the direction of turning the chickens into optimized food machines.
Another step? They aren't getting any more optimized, if anything new available options are scaling that back in favor of more land-use, open space, slower growth.
> Sorry, I'm a dreamer I guess, continuously disappointed by a world that doesn't seem to be able to set any significant goals nor pursue them at large scale unless it's for profit and likely at the cost of the rest of the world.
You're free to consume whatever you want.
EDIT: my opening sentence is not fair. But it invited a lot of response. That can walk a thin line but in this case I figure it worked out. If my post were purely inflammatory, then it would be counter-productive but I don't see it that way.
[+] [-] theloosifer|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] golergka|5 years ago|reply
You, as a consumer, directly dictate to companies what is profitable and what's not by what you choose to buy and what you choose not to buy. Dichotomy of profit and ethics doesn't make any sense: profit is a signal which among other things also includes information about what consumers think if ethical or unethical, and how important it is to them.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
There's no reason the meat industry couldn't divert the male chickens into a separate supply chain where they were raised until 6-8 months and then slaughtered and sold as stewing meat or some other (decent tasting) protein product for human consumption. The roosters don't develop aggressive behaviours until much later.
But that would be inefficient by market measures. So it doesn't happen.
[+] [-] stickfigure|5 years ago|reply
That said, as you noted, on an industrial scale you would separate the roosters. But it's not clear that there's any market at all for rooster meat. Chicken meat is incredibly cheap and adds surprisingly little margin above the main input cost - feed. Roosters consume just as much feed but produce a lesser quantity of inferior meat. The margins are likely to be negative.
It's an efficiency story yes, but of the "you'll go bankrupt with this idea" sort.
[+] [-] dundercoder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
I assume that that cost of an egg for a broiler chicken is less than the price delta for fewer pounds of worse meat that takes longer to produce, so it's still more cost effective to accept the male chicks as a sunk cost and move on.
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
Setting aside the ethics, purpose bred meat birds are much less expensive to raise and more desirable to consumers.
[+] [-] noxer|5 years ago|reply
>But that would be inefficient by market measures.
>No reason
>Gives reason
[+] [-] sveme|5 years ago|reply
I really don't see an advantage of this technology for the consumer, the real advantage lies with the producers.
[+] [-] La1n|5 years ago|reply
It would seem to me these are still killed. Lacto-ovo vegetarians might still prefer no-kill egg as shown in the article.
[+] [-] asdasdasfasgasd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csunbird|5 years ago|reply
REWE is a little bit away from my location.
[+] [-] jansan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
Honestly, what difference does it really make if male chickens are shredded and ground up into feed pre or post hatching? It's the same result in the end.
[+] [-] war1025|5 years ago|reply
People almost universally feel that infanticide is wrong.
Abortion for whatever reason is easier for people to stomach.
Basically it's easier for people to feel good about preventing an embryo from turning into a cute little baby than it is for them to immediately kill that cute little baby once it's born.
[+] [-] pr0zac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehjoker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0astbread|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
We are not simply just eating animals.
In nature there is an equilibrium; every prey has a chance to escape. If an species cannot avoid predators, that species ceases to exist.
In our world there is no such merciful release.
We force millions of creatures to be born and live their entire lives in cramped squalid conditions only to be butchered off, sometimes for no good reason at all. [0][1]
That’s not nature. That is a fucked up hell.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993157
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990724
[+] [-] kilian_a|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triangleman|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AamACDnwRts
[+] [-] afrojack123|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Floegipoky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|5 years ago|reply
This is a completely automated process, and the algorithm is "embarrassingly parallel". It's cheaper, of course, to merely sex the chicks and grind up the males, but there are a lot of ways to handle that, from charging extra to simply mandating a switch to this process.
Small-scale farms could pool the purchase of the egg processor, or buy their chicks instead of breeding them, and the price of any industrial process goes down fairly predictably over time. I'm just not seeing what you're seeing here.
[+] [-] Semaphor|5 years ago|reply
First time I’ve seen this, that’s a really cool feature.
[+] [-] aazaa|5 years ago|reply
This seems counterintuitive. If the external pressure is equally applied around the egg, what forces the fluid to escape?
[+] [-] mohn|5 years ago|reply
Looking at this 2020 video[0], it seems like the procedure might be:
1) Laser burns pinhole through shell.
2) Robotic pipette applies the marker chemical onto pinhole.
3) Pneumatic grabber picks up egg by its pinhole end (so the atmospheric pressure, relatively higher than the pressure inside the grabber, is pushing a little fluid out).
4) Egg is stored so marker chemical can be read later after it has undergone its reaction.
I found a 2018 video as well[1], but the machine looks a lot different and it's harder to tell how it works.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeAWcF1MxNo&t=26s
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEtauP71oLU
[+] [-] majewsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dep_b|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|5 years ago|reply
It's nice that someone figured out a way to optimize this and reduce unnecessary death. Massive kudos to them.
I've been raised to think: "what if there was a higher species of Aliens that farmed humans for their meat?" Yeah I definitely wouldn't want those aliens to kill me just because I'm male.
[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
I think it could only be called "no kill" if there was a way to ensure each fertilised egg is female.
[+] [-] jawns|5 years ago|reply
But you're right, it's just killing the chick earlier in its lifecycle, before it hatches. Analogous to aborting a human while in the womb, versus killing it shortly after birth.
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marton_s|5 years ago|reply
The good news is, according to section 5.2.4 of the the "respeggt System Manual"[1] they are forbidden to kill earlier than 12 weeks old.
[1] https://respeggt-group.com/files/respeggt-Systemhandbuch_en....
Edit: link to the English system manual
[+] [-] ChrisRR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprobableTruth|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://respeggt.com/nl/de-producten/
[+] [-] seventytwo|5 years ago|reply