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- What do they do with the male chickens? About 50% of hatched eggs will be males. - Do they let the chickens live until they die of natural causes? Or do they

• thrower123 7y ago
  For egg production, usually they are killed as chicks. This can be quite gruesome in the larger outfits, where they are sorted and the males run through essentially a woodchipper. If you have too many adult roosters running around, they act like assholes and start fighting, pecking eggs, and other nastiness, so you don't want to keep them. Meat chickens are usually mixed sex, as they are bred to grow so quickly that you slaughter them after only two or three months. Historically, people would castrate male chicks and raise them as capons for eating, but that's become rather niche.