Related to this, I had been dreaming up an idea for a start-up for a while that uses computer imaging techniques to do non-invasive in-ovo sexing of bird eggs for the poultry industry. It seems criminal that we gas or drop into a macerator over half of the chickens hatched. It's just so cruel and seems like it could be done at an embryonic stage where they don't yet have the capacity for pain or sentience.
Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati...
This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.
The ones dropped into the macerator are the lucky ones. The ones who live suffer for their short lives, until their economic utility curve crosses a threshold value and they are also slaughtered.
I wouldn't say lucky - I'd rather go through the rest of life suffering than die at this moment, as there is a joy to be found in that itself - but I understand your sentiments. Very few would choose not being born over life, as you can't predict how life will be, even for these chickens. The chickens that live in my neighbour's garden had a horrible 2 years of life in cages, followed by a great 10 or so.
Reducing pain and suffering is better than not doing anything at all, and it's childish to assume that we can do anything more than regulate our food habits, and perhaps a couple of those around us. I'm vegan; I'm not deluded enough to think that my eating habits are anywhere near mainstream. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight for animal agriculture, whatever my personal feelings may be about that, so the next best thing one can do is reduce suffering where possible, and in-ovo sexing in hatcheries works a small way towards that.
I under that factory farming is absolutely ugly and there is a lot of low hanging fruit in how to improve it. But I never understand the extremist philosophy that no one should eat chickens or raise them in their back yard for eggs. Chickens simply don’t exist in the wild and are very far removed from the jungle fowl from which they came so long ago. If we stopped eating and raising them, they would go extinct. Is it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely?
Is it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely?
if those are the two choices, then i'd prefer the later.
but isn't there a third choice? to raise chicken in good conditions?
i suppose maybe that doing so would reduce the amount of chicken we can consume, and also raise the price, but i think that is preferable to letting them suffer.
While I get your overall point, I'd just like to point out the island of Kauai (and the rest of the islands of Hawaii). They have a massive wild chicken population.
> Very few would choose not being born over life ...
Err, Moksha, or something like it is pretty much the goal of a number of religions practised by a significant chunk of the planet.
Many years ago I met someone who only eats egg whites. I watched him pouring yolks into the drain. I asked, why do you do that? He answered, because yolks contain unhealthy fats.
Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better. We discard half of all hatched chicks. I eat eggs. I decided to accept that ugly fact. If you don't, stop eating eggs and poultry. Or raise your own chickens. Anything else is hypocrisy. At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals.
Technology can help. Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot. Usually when I am buying or eating eggs it is easy for me to not think about discarded male chicks. Then I pray for forgiveness.
I prefer to buy eggs where the label says they are from free-range chickens, however.
> Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot.
Killing male chicks after birth has been forbidden in France since 2022 though, eggs must be sorted before birth.
Moral outrage is supposed to turn into law and then it has to be done, economical or not. It can work, not everything has to be seen through the lens of money.
I'm actually incubating my first round of eggs today and we're trying to get an 8:1 ratio of hens to roosters. I found a paper from the early 1900s that documented the old way of sexing eggs.
After the egg is laid and has cooled off, a bubble forms in the wider end of the egg. If you candle the egg the bubble will either be centered in the end of the egg if its male, or the bubble will be offset and not touching the end point of the egg at all.
No clue if it will actually work but interestingly enough we did get roughly a 50/50 split from our chickens. I guess we'll find out in about 9-12 weeks if the trick actually worked!
The Circuit uses a laser to create a tiny hole of 0.3 mm (0.01 in) in the shell of all fertilized hatching eggs. A minimal amount of allantoic fluid is then extracted from the hatching eggs and placed into an external marker.
From https://www.respeggt.com/technology/. According to their own site, they are a for-profit organisation incorporated in Köln, are focused on humane poultry and appear to have invented this technology.
I don't know where you live, but you have to be aware of exactly what the labelling rules are where you buy eggs. In Britain, free range only means that the hens have access to open-air spaces, but not that the hens ordinarily inhabit that area. Considering the strict hierarchy that chickens form (the original pecking order), some individuals might never get an opportunity to be in this open-air space.
Organic is a different protected term in the UK that has additional conditions, such as a more humane limit on the density of the hens' accomodation and stricter dietary requirements.
It's a really complicated issue with some fierce lobbying from the intensive farming industry to loosen the welfare requirements, but suffice it to say that there is a 'euphemism treadmill' of constantly changing terminology depending on whether the factory farming or the welfare lobbies have the upper hand at any given moment.
I don't really see the reason for obsessing over hypocrisy in such a way. Humans are inconsistent and illogical in their choices all the time, trying to pretend we're logical machines is a practice in futility — one that many great philosophers have taken the time to tear apart over the centuries. I don't eat my eggs in a certain way because it's logically consistent, I eat them because I like them.
TIL an egg sexing technology has been developed and that this allowed to ban chick sexing. I am happy about that.
Re "free-range" chickens: TIL that this is not an useful label in some countries. Thanks for pointing this out. This needs some more research, especially what this means where I live.
> At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals.
I don’t understand the ethical framework here. Is it just that you feel bad? Then, why do you feel a need to impose your feelings on others who don’t necessarily feel the same way? If you are saying this because of a belief system, it’s unclear. Can you name or explain it?
I believe in Islam. Our God told us in revelation that He created animals for our consumption, thus we see nothing wrong with killing and eating them. (Our prophet told us to minimize the suffering of an animal while killing it.) Being omniscient, God has the knowledge to definitively determine moral and immoral actions. Being the omnipotent creator and ruler of everything, He has the authority to order humans to behave as per his ethics. Thus I preach God’s morality as I see it. From my viewpoint, I am self-consistent. Now think about your situation. Why should the feelings of fallible people just like me should determine at all how I should act? Are you self-consistent?
Hope this doesn’t come across as offensive, rather legitimate questions to think about. Feel free to point out any mistakes.
> Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better.
There is a difference though. According to Wikipedia, the remains of female chicks are later used in cat food and fertilizers. Anyways, the idea is that it is not wasted. Throwing yolks down the drain is just waste.
Or at least that's what I've seen. It is actually not that easy to find information about what is done after chick culling. Almost all sources focus on the ethics of killing. But I think what is done with the remains doesn't get enough attention.
We kill to eat, directly or indirectly, vegans less than meat eaters, but there is no way around it unless we make radical change to society, and by radical I mean stuff like genocide or science fiction level technology, so, no. So I think we need to settle for the next best thing, that is making sure all that killing is put to good use.
So, if the chick remains are wasted I agree that something needs to be done. If the remains are used for feeding cats in a way that reduces the need for other food sources (like chicken people could eat), then it is not as bad. Gruesome, sure, but at least, it is not a meaningless death, that's what fed your cat.
The whole poultry industry is insane and "criminal". If eggs costs just 2$ and McChicken less than 2$, and company still profits you cannot expect an ethic industry.
If you are ajust a little bit critical and realistic with human endeavors, you should see that ethic industry is an outright oxymoron. Capitalism and Ethics are fundamentally exclusive. Whenever they claim otherwise, it is propaganda.
If you imagine the space of possible things we can do, the vector marked "make as much money as possible" isn't perfectly parallel with how most people would draw the one marked "be as ethical as possible"[0]. But the entire reason capitalism happened was that 248 years ago some Scottish dude noticed that, quite often, they're pointing in similar directions.
Adam Smith didn't phrase it like that, and many people have mistaken "similar" for "identical" when this is absolutely not so (we also didn't have a deep understanding of what's now called Goodhart's law until much later), but it has made a huge difference to the quality of life of many people despite the things it does wrong.
Also don't forget that we don't, and never have, lived in a pure free market, and that governments can and do pass laws to restrict what business are permitted to do — lots of money to be made in selling cocaine and heroin, both used to be sold as cough medicine, and then the law changed.
[0] phrased weirdly because most people disagree about how to draw the "ethics" vector, too.
Awesome. I only mentioned that one because it looked to be the only one that was non-invasive. It looks like you managed to get an invasive method to scale though, which is great.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I do wonder to what extent the MRI magnet poses a safety risk? Also these things are quite expensive, I wonder how the producers view the costs involved. I wonder whether fNIRS could be a cheaper and safer alternative. (Obviously, such a system is a good development.)
Yes, I absolutely agree that it is better to do this than dropping half the chicks into a macerator.
What is amazing to me, is that this is using MRI, which is a very expensive technology. Eg simple scans are very expensive for a consumer. But here, following your link, the MRI tech is in use, capable of acting 24000 eggs an hour, and can check not just for sex, but also for cracks in the shell, air sack placement, etc.
Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati...
This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.