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World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)
- marton_s 6y agoI 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. [1] https://respeggt-group.com/files/respeggt-Systemhandbuch_en.pdf https://respeggt-group.com/files/respeggt-Systemhandbuch_en.... Edit: link to the English system manual
- slothtrop 6y agoSarcasm aside is killing a 1 year old, let alone at 12 weeks, more ethical than killing a day-old chick? The latter is basically post-natal abortion, which, is not a huge world different than abortion aside from consciousness of inflicted pain.
- codingdave 6y ago12 weeks is the point at which they have grown enough to be viable as a meat supply. Killing a 1 day old chick has zero purpose to the wider world - it is just killing. Harvesting for meat at 12+ weeks serves the purpose of feeding people. If you have an ethical problem with eating animals at all, this won't matter. Otherwise, killing animals for food is part of our reality, and waiting until the 12 week mark brings the killing in line with the realities (and problems) of our worldwide food supply chain.
- slothtrop 6y agoGood point.
- zaroth 6y agoI don’t think there’s a binary switch at any single point from conception to birth to 1 year old where an organism switches from “not conscious to pain” to “conscious to pain”. The first few days / weeks after birth are certainly louder but otherwise not much different developmentally from the preceding days.
- slothtrop 6y agoCertainly it doesn't change in an instant, that development is a process just like the rest. Still in the very early stages, "not conscious to pain" seems to be the case, but "conscious to pain" may begin earlier than people think.
- Aeronwen 6y agoYou certainly didn't have a brain or nervous system at the moment you were conceived. So there had to be some point in your development where you made the switch to being "conscious to pain".
- zaroth 6y agoIt’s just a fun thought experiment. If you decide that consciousness [of pain] can’t possibly be a binary switch, then perhaps that also means being conscious isn’t a binary property. If it isn’t a binary property, then is it a property that varies in degree based on developmental age (e.g. counting day 0 as conception)? Is it a quantity that can be measured quantitatively? If it can be measured, do some fully developed humans have more or less of it? Do some non-humans have more or less of it?
- saagarjha 6y ago(2018)
- f_allwein 6y agoalso, there's various eggs on the (German) market where they just let the male chicks live - see https://www.bruderhahn.de/ https://www.bruderhahn.de/
- asdasdasfasgasd 6y ago2020 update: the eggs actually became available in supermarkets (REWE) for little extra cost, but are subject to regional availability.
- jansan 6y agoThanks, I will look out for them when getting my lunch later today.
- csunbird 6y agoIs it only in REWE or can we find them in Edeka/Aldi/Lidl? REWE is a little bit away from my location.
- dewey 6y agoREWE has a great online shop in case that’s an option for you. I exclusively use that one for the past year and it works really well.
- abhishekash 6y agoAgreed. I wonder why none of other competitors do that, especially in current context. There is Amazon fresh and Bringmeister but they arent as good.
- ce4 6y agoWait a bit for market forces to do their work. I'm sure the others will follow suit Edit: the article is from 2018. Lidl has announced recently that they plan to have that for their organic eggs starting in early 2021 and their free range eggs until end of 2021. Source: https://unternehmen.lidl.de/pressreleases/2020/200714_lidl_eier-ohne-kuekentoeten https://unternehmen.lidl.de/pressreleases/2020/200714_lidl_e...
- dschuler 6y agoFree range eggs by end of 2021 right? This is great! Hopefully Lidl will have them in other countries as well so I can buy them.
- cik 6y agoFalse headline. In most western countries eggs are unfertilized in the first place. Here in Israel that's the case.
- asdasdasfasgasd 6y agoBut you need to raise hens to get eggs. And if it turns out a rooster, you kill it instantly. This method avoids hatching the roosters.
- J-dawg 6y agoIt has often surprised me how many people don't understand this part of the egg industry. I eat eggs, so I'm definitely not making any moral judgements, but the process is brutal. I would definitely buy no-kill eggs when they come to the UK.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoYou can make moral judgements if you acknowledge that you violate your own morality rather than having illusions otherwise. It just shows how powerful are cultural momentum and habit and the path of least resistance.
- kgwgk 6y agoThe eggs are like every other egg. What seems to change is the process to procure the animals that will lay those eggs. Instead of killing the male chickens as they hatch, you destroy the eggs halfway through the incubation period.
- eps 6y agoGo read the article.
- Jonnax 6y agoThe article states that 4 to 6 billion male chicks are killed a year. When looking to raise hens to lay eggs. This company has developed a system for identifying the sex of a chicken whilst it is an egg. So that they don't need to hatch it to determine if it's a male chicken and then kill it.
- dep_b 6y agoIt'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.
- carlmr 6y agoCapon is considered animal cruelty in many countries, so availability is an issue here. Aside from that I'm not sure how you imagine not killing the birds by eating them?
- dep_b 6y agoI'm simply stating that raising them to eat is better than just gassing them immediately. If you're against eating meat as a principle then it's probably pretty useless. But eating the less wanted meat or produce really helps preventing pollution through overproduction of food that is never eaten. There are many people that think it's more ethical to kill a cow just for it's meat than to eat the meat of a horse, which is never bred just for it's meat. Both capon and horse meat are tastier than chicken and veal.
- La1n 6y ago>I'm simply stating that raising them to eat is better than just gassing them immediately. I think that is more of an ethical debate than a fact. One could argue that most farmed chickens live a life of suffering, and keeping them suffering long is not better than gassing them immediately.
- dep_b 6y agoBut the same goes for the chickens that remain to lay eggs.
- carlmr 6y agoI see your point, it was just the wording of "not killing" which I found a bit odd. The environmental argument makes sense, the ethical argument depends on many factors.
- Semaphor 6y ago> This article is more than 1 year old First time I’ve seen this, that’s a really cool feature.
- ChrisRR 6y agoI'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?
- ainiriand 6y agoPet food, usually. Low grade stock cubes too.
- romanoderoma 6y agoSo the question now becomes: what will they use to make pet food? Given that in US (for example) there are 160 million pets and a cat eats around 200-300 grams of meat everyday, which is more than half of the global World population have at their disposal.
- kgwgk 6y agoUsing horses is also frowned upon...
- TheGallopedHigh 6y agoNot in Europe
- kgwgk 6y agoGiving horse meat to animals is a waste :-)
- ChrisRR 6y agoWhat else are you going to do with a dead horse?
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
- jansan 6y agoI 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.
- jcampbell1 6y agoFYI —- For every chicken you eat, one male chick is shredded. For every 300 eggs you eat, one male chick is shredded.
- triangleman 6y agoCheck the sibling comment linking to a 9-day-old chicken embryo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211285
- bbarn 6y agoWhy is it wrong? If the end stage of that chick is an adult that costs more to feed than it's worth, causes a price increase to consumers, and it still ends up killed and processed in some way, why not just humanely kill it instantly? Industrial grinding is gross but not particularly cruel in practice. It's fast and effective and doesn't cause undue stress before killing the animal.
- rsynnott 6y agoThis strikes me as an extremely weird attitude. The chicken you're eating lived for generally seven to nine weeks, probably with limited or no access to the outdoors and likely in a small cage. It was then transported a fairly long distance with no food or water on a lorry, then killed by either being hung upside down on a conveyor and dragged through electrified water, or gassed (usually with CO2, which is not painless). This all sounds much, much worse than a fairly instant death almost immediately out of coming out of the egg, to me... I suppose it's kind of _unaesthetic_, and maybe people have unrealistic impressions of what the lives of the chickens that don't get shredded are like, but I think this is all mostly a perception issue.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoI think I want to become vegan ... again
- raxxorrax 6y agoI am not, but I didn't eat chickens for a long time now. Allegedly, recent rulings allowed to process diseased chickens in the US and I believe they planned to allow processing dead chickens too. Treatment isn't really better in the rest of the world of course and especially chickens are treated very poorly.
- disown 6y agoA lot more animals are killed to raise plants/vegetation. And I'm not talking a little more, I'm talking 1000X more. What will you do now?
- subungual 6y agoWe grow plants to feed the animals we raise for food. This is far less efficient than eating the plants themselves, and it leads to more animals being killed for the reasons you mention.
- KitDuncan 6y agoSo we are killing billions of animals each year to eat. I very much doubt we are killing trillions of animals by farming plants. Can you show any sources for your claims. Also yeah, the fast majority of crops is farmed for animal feed, so your point is even more invalid.
- Vinnl 6y agoGiven 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?)
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoAccording 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. [1] https://respeggt.com/nl/de-producten/ https://respeggt.com/nl/de-producten/
- Vinnl 6y agoAh, since relatively recently even, thanks! I'll look for them soon. Then the question is: which would be preferable, these or organic eggs?
- sveme 6y agoI'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.
- La1n 6y ago> the males grow large enough to be edible, It would seem to me these are still killed. Lacto-ovo vegetarians might still prefer no-kill egg as shown in the article.
- gadders 6y agoUnless the chickens are kept after they finish laying eggs, no commercial egg laying is no kill. Most battery or free range hens are killed (or if they're lucky, rescued for home use) at a year old as they approach their first moult.
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoAt the very least it's still less-kill.
- SkyBelow 6y agoHow is it less kill if all the male chicks are raised then used for meat? Same number of chickens being killed either way, some just get slightly longer to live.
- jhasse 6y agoSome die before you have the chance to kill them.
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoI was specifically talking about the method from the OP, where male chicks aren't killed (unless you count destroying the egg as killing them).
- gadders 6y agoI hope this technology becomes affordable for people who breed chickens at home. I hate culling the male chickens.
- globular-toast 6y agoIt's still killing the egg. But I guess we feel better about killing an egg than a hatched, fluffy chick? I think it could only be called "no kill" if there was a way to ensure each fertilised egg is female.
- jawns 6y agoWell, 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.
- slfnflctd 6y agoIf you're going to split hairs on ethics, the real question is how much pain/suffering is involved. From what I've read, most scientists agree the neurological wiring to feel pain is not in place until past the point when nearly all abortions occur. If this was also true for the developing male chicks, I would certainly prefer that outcome.
- slothtrop 6y agoSay, what are your thoughts on abortion?
- KitDuncan 6y agoIt is stupid those are called "no-kill" eggs. Still plenty of killing/suffering involved. Just stop eating eggs people. It's not that hard.
- slothtrop 6y agoSeems like an apt description to me. If you're referring to killing chickens for consumption, eggs have no bearing, it has its own demand.
- Falling3 6y agoThere's no way to sell eggs and turn a profit without killing hens. Their production wanes as they get older and they are killed to make way for the new generation. This has nothing to do with demand for meat. Your parent comment is right; these are not "no-kill". At best, they're "less-kill".
- slothtrop 6y agoI believe this is true of conventional caged farming, not all of it. If they can aspire to "no-kill" on one level, no reason they can't do so across the board. > There's no way to sell eggs and turn a profit without killing hens. Would like to see a source on that.
- difosfor 6y agoI 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.
- slothtrop 6y agoNothing's ever enough for vegans. > 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.
- leetcrew 6y ago> Nothing's ever enough for vegans. is that surprising? most vegans I know care more about the animals' quality of life than whether or not they end up getting slaughtered. this is a large part of why they are vegans and not merely vegetarians. interestingly, I find that they tend to be pretty accepting of hunting.
- kevinmgranger 6y ago
- beigeoak 6y ago> If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks Here is the video, timestamped (24m30s) to the "culling" of male chicks. Trigger Warnings: NSFL, Gore. https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=1470 https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=1470 On a purely personal note, this documentary made me re-evaluate my diet. I'm still not strong enough to be off meat even though that is what I want, but I have successfully abstained from chicken, pig and cow for the past 2 years.
- kilian_a 6y agoOrbem from Munich is creating an MRI based approach to determining chicks genders and egg fertility which may be more scalable. https://orbem.ai/ https://orbem.ai/
- triangleman 6y agoThis is great! Probably the best long term solution, like the grape sorting machines we already depend on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AamACDnwRts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AamACDnwRts
- afrojack123 6y agoNegative this is a horrible idea. MRI would sap all the nutrition from food.
- grawprog 6y agoSo, 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.
- tehjoker 6y agoIt'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).
- kgwgk 6y ago> the line between egg and birth is a clear line > (depending on how close to hatching it is) Not so clear a line then.
- tehjoker 6y agoYea, it's not completely clear where the actual line is, but it's absolutely clear where it is not. So the claims of this company should be inspected to see if they are closer or further from the real line.
- war1025 6y agoIt's the whole abortion vs infanticide debate. 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.
- grawprog 6y agoIt's not though, we're talking about chickens that are for the most part destined to live in a cage and end up on someone's plate.
- noxer 6y agoAre we just gonna ignore the fact that there definitely is a living chicken inside the egg after 9 days. Sure its probably better kill it as early as possible but "no-kill" is simply a lie. source: https://youtu.be/uE0uKvUbcfw?t=389 https://youtu.be/uE0uKvUbcfw?t=389
- trianglem 6y agoIt’s the abortion debate but with chickens.
- noxer 6y agoPeople want it to be but facts are not up for a debate.
- 0-_-0 6y agoHow does your argument apply to humans then? How long until you consider an embryo a living human?
- noxer 6y agoI didn't even made an argument. "To kill" means somehow causing the death of something. This the fact. It doesn't matter if its a animal or a human. An certainly doesn't matter where it happens. You can kill something/someone on purpose, by accident or "involuntary on purpose" like in self defense but that doesn't change the killing part. You caused the death of something = you killed. Facts are neutral. I'm not saying chicks should or should not be killed whether inside the egg or outside. All I'm saying is that it is without any doubt killing, therefore the "no-kill" thing is a lie. Killing an embryo inside a human obviously is killing to. There is a special word for that but that doesn't change the facts. Also I assume with "embryo" you meant a "human embryo" so by definition it is already a living human (assuming its not a dead human embryo). Its a living humans it a early development state that we call embryo it will become a living humans fetus and so on unless it dies or gets killed. These are the facts, words have meanings and definitions. Thats why we can not kill SARS-CoV-2 with bleach because by definition viruses are not alive so we can not cause its death)
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoThe 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.
- noxer 6y ago>There's no reason the meat industry couldn't.... >But that would be inefficient by market measures. >No reason >Gives reason
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI can't help you if you choose to read things that pedantically. Maybe get a job as a lawyer. I guess I need to edit and insert "no technical reason" or "no non-price sensitive reason" in for you?
- deeeeplearning 6y ago>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. reply Tell that to the kids literally starving in Yemen... Or the 8 Million people that died of starvation last year. Your holier than thou stance is kind of disgusting in the face of immense human suffering.
- ogre_codes 6y agoAs a hobby grower, I'd pay a premium for birds like this. We buy sex links and the idea that the dude chicks get slaughtered bothers be some. Though my SIL has expressed a willingness to slaughter the roosters so perhaps I'll just buy straight runs from now on and eat fresh chicken.
- codyb 6y agoIt was only recently I put two and two together and realized farmers kill all the male calfs which result from impregnating cows so they can start being milked. On the other hand... veal is delicious. But it does feel a bit bad. At this point I just aim for local farms for meat as much as possible, and organic and pasture raised where I can't. Even if they still kill the male borns, at least I know the animals are being treated a bit better.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agowhat about steers?
- codyb 6y agoWell, yea, certainly they let some of them grow up to become beef products instead of veal products. But a lot of them just become veal since they have their quantity of steer head already. And the females are grown up and impregnated and milked and the process repeats. At least, that's my understanding of it all anyways.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoEvery time I see how animals on factory farms are treated I want to take up hunting.
- jedimastert 6y agoI 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raisedbyninjas 6y agoThere are many things we may not be able to stomach, which are morally acceptable. I would not be a good surgeon, content moderator examining gore and child abuse, crime scene cleaner, spider wrangler.
- dheera 6y ago2018? It's 2020, are they here in the US yet?
- seventytwo 6y agoI wonder where anti-abortion people come down on this. In their view, isn’t destroying the male egg the same as culling the male chick?
- ceejayoz 6y agoFor anti-abortion vegans/vegetarians, quite possibly. If you're already eating meat, you're already demonstrably OK with the killing of an animal.
- SkyBelow 6y agoMorals of meat treatment seems to be a vast whirlwind of inconsistency that I think largely stem from people know having a full understanding of how their meat gets on the table. I've grown up rural enough to have butchered a few animals and can easily talk about it while at the dinner table, but many people seem to have this extremely strong line between the animal and the meat, and even if they intellectually known they are related, it isn't emotionally connecting.
- orblivion 6y ago> anti-abortion vegans/vegetarians Probably not many out there. Which is funny since it would seem at a distance to come from the same instinct. My best guess is that it's political tribalism that creates the split.
- wnoise 6y agoThey generally don't care because it's not humans being killed. You'd need to ask an anti-abortion vegan.
- corytheboyd 6y agoWarning: American viewpoint that might not make as much sense applied globally. I’d go so far as to say it’s also because it is not heavily politicized either. The political right already has (human) abortion to win the emotional vote, they have no reason to go any further as those people will never change their minds on average (which is good enough to win elections) For the record I don’t at all think abortion should be politicized, and seeing such clear pandering to emotion to win votes is so fucking tiring to see happen now, it’s tiring to read about it throughout history, and it’s tiring to know it’s going nowhere for the future.
- fmakunbound 6y agoIt's not like ground-up male chicks are wasted. They're used in dog food, fertilizer and possibly Chicken McNuggets.
- BillyButcher 6y agoDo we know the progress of this project?
- Floegipoky 6y agoThis 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.
- samatman 6y agoWhy would you conclude this? 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.
- gpvos 6y ago>Male chicks don’t grow fast enough to justify the cost of feeding them up for meat. Why is this? Logically that would mean that either 1) females grow faster than males, or 2) all chickens that are used for meat are first used for laying eggs, because that's the only economic way. I'm fairly sure that neither is the case.
- chongli 6y agoChickens raised for meat are different breeds from chickens raised for laying eggs. Male chicks of the egg-laying variety are good for neither meat nor eggs (being unable to lay them).
- samatman 6y agoNeither is correct. Actual answer is: commercially, meat chickens and egg chickens are completely different breeds. In "broiler" chickens, they put on muscle at an astonishing rate; for laying chickens, they output eggs prodigiously. The male laying chicks grow so slowly, with a small ultimate body size, as to be economically uncompetitive with broilers.
- aazaa 6y ago> 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?
- majewsky 6y agoI would assume the external pressure causes the shell to elastically deform so that it contains less volume, hence a drop of fluid is squeezed out.
- aazaa 6y agoIsn't that drop experiencing the same pressure as well? If so, what causes the fluid to escape?
- notatoad 6y agothat droplet would be experiencing the same pressure from the air pushing inward, but also a pressure pushing outward proportional to the amount the egg has contracted. more pressure pushing out than in means fluid comes out.
- ac42 6y agoWhy would the egg contract in the first place? It's more likely that the "applied pressure" is simply negative...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- majewsky 6y agoIt's the same as when you squeeze a plastic bottle. If the cap is unscrewed, the liquid will splash out of the opening. The egg is just a bit less flexible than the plastic bottle, so the effect is less visible.
- orblivion 6y agoI thought this was still on the horizon. I'm amazed I didn't hear about this for 2 years.
- nojvek 6y agoI 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.
- yyyyaaaa 6y agoFor some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
- perl4ever 6y agoA little late, but I don't see (ctrl-F reptile) anyone who noted the odd statement that male chicks have no economic purpose, but are processed into "reptile food". Does that imply reptile food has no economic value? Do the reptiles eat as much if there are no male chicks culled?
- Razengan 6y agoTo 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] That’s not nature. That is a fucked up hell. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993157 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24990724