Illegal Culling of Male Chicks In Meat Industry to be Prohibited From 2022 in Germany

Germany has passed Legislation, making the culling of male chicks in the meat industry unauthorized from January 1, 2022. This makes Germany the first country to prohibit by law the mass killing of chicks.

The Meat Industry

The meat industry makes use of chicken products in two major approaches. One is to grow broiler chickens, females that will quickly gain weight and therefore are known to be economically valuable because of their meat. The others are egg layers, produced to churn out as many eggs they can churn before being reclassified as soup chickens.

It's a process that calls for many females with males only playing the role of fertilizing eggs. As such, male chickens are culled routinely not too long after hatching, as they aren't recognized as an economically viable choice. In farming chicken traditionally, when it comes to the male chicks, an approach to use the young animals for another purpose into low-quality feed has seen them shredded collectively in previous years.

Germany Leading the Way

Germany is now leading the way out of this ethical practice that is questionable, making it unlawful from next year to partake in the mass culling of male chicks. In 2019, Federal Administrative Court of Germany ruled that the concerns of animal welfare surpassed the industry's economic interests.

Farmers will now have to make use of an innovative technology that can stop male chicks from being born by sexing chicken eggs that are developing. The method cuts a little hole in the shell of eggs that are still developing and tests it for sex-dependent hormones. This way, developing males can be gotten rid of long before hatching, putting a stop to the immoral shredding practice that generally processes around 43 million chicks every year in Germany.

Chick Culling

Chick culling is the process of recognizing unhealthy chicks that are newly hatched and are not suitable for placement on a broiler farm. Chick culling takes place at the hatchery in all kinds of production including free-range, conventional, or organic. Every week most broiler hatcheries hatch hundreds of thousands of chicks or even more.

The broad majority of those chicks are in good condition and go on to the farm to develop and flourish. Unfortunately, there is a very small ratio of chicks, that are hatched with sickness or some other adverse condition. While only a small ratio, chicken companies take every course of action to prevent this from taking place.

When it happens, companies will humanely euthanize an ill or injured chick so as to prevent them from suffering more. The culled chicks are humanely euthanized via methods approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Due to the fact that male chickens do not lay eggs, they are often culled and humanely euthanized in conformity with approved veterinary standards not too long after they hatch.

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