They’re usually shredded alive almost immediately because they’re seen as “waste” since they don’t lay eggs
For some more context:
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Not in Germany and France since 2022!
France made a carveout that still allows it :/
An exception to a New Year’s resolution by France to end the massive culling of male chicks will still allow millions to be killed,
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230102-france-fails-to-end-culling-of-male-chicks
That’s only in industrial egg production. If you’re a local farmer and you need to dispose of the males, your go to quick and painless option might be a potato sack or your hands.
Industrial egg production is the vast majority of egg production. Using the word only there is perhaps a bit misleading when for instance, 98.2% of US egg production is from factory farms [1]
I’m not sure one can call any of those methods painless either
The industry is slowly evolving away from it tho. I’ve seen “no chick killing” or something similar on labels in German shops.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html
The technology for it that currently scale to higher egg consumption rather well among other potential problems
They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.
[…]
One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling
Culling unhatched eggs seems less cruel to me than culling <1 day hatchlings. Cute-bias, I know.
Seems to scale somewhat in Europe, talking many many millions of eggs per year too.
At least trying is better than nothing.
Not saying it’s perfect, but tech is advancing thought it would be interesting to add that to this thread…
That is because it got forbidden. They never would do something that lessens their profit without being forced to do it.
maybe, but you can’t feed a population on backyard farms. If everybody wants to eat eggs, there has to be a massive production, and it will be this kind of hell. The only logical way to prevent this is to stop treating animals as resources. We are perfectly able to feed with plants, we know how to get every necessary nutrient. Animal agriculture needs to stop, and if we’re truly leftists, we have to stand against any exploitation. How could we evolve as a society if we continue to use sentient beings as mere resources?
Chickens are domesticated to the point that they cannot survive in the wild / have no ecological niche. Without some small scale animal agriculture like backyard chickens they would go extinct, though you could argue it’s for the best.
Personally I think small-scale egg farming is not exploitative when the chickens are treated well.
Dumb question maybe, but why not just let them get older and then eat them?
they can’t risk letting a bunch of angry young men stage an uprising
I had this same question, I learned “meat” chickens are called broiler chickens, they were bred to put on weight rapidly. Egg laying chickens are separate breed and grow slower or won’t grow to the size of a broiler. The industry is limited by containment footage, so they wouldn’t use a male egg laying chick where they could house a broiler.
This is really unfortunate. I see the size of chicken breasts these days, and it’s silly. Our society is very wasteful.
Wasteful of what, though?
If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.
It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.
They’re totally different breed designed to lay as much eggs as physically possible compared to broilers that are designed to grow edible muscle as much and as fast as possible.
More info here.
Because we like big chicken breasts and we cannot lie.
(Male chickens of egg-laying breeds don’t have as much meat, and also the males left together often compete and can try to kill each other. You’d want around a dozen hens per rooster, compared to roughly 1:1 that would come out naturally with eggs, and have enough space for each to call their own).
Roosters are very aggressive and territorial and wouldn’t just chill with homies.
plus Cock Meat is an awkward marketing phrase for some.
My dad has had pet chickens for decades, and his roosters always chill. They’re highly intelligent animals. If you give them lots of vegetation and space and provide for their basic needs and well-being, they don’t really get too aggressive.
Yea see that’s the problem right there. No of these companies provide any of that to their chickens.
It’s not profitable to do so. Capitalism is relentless and soulless.
There’s no way socialism would provide that either on the scale that the Western world consumes chickens. We should still go vegan in a socialist economy.
The industry kills them right away because they’re not selectively breeded to grow as fast as broilers do. Egg laying chicken have been selectively bred to lay high quantities of eggs instead
Due to modern selective breeding, laying hen strains differ from meat production strains (broilers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
As an aside, in both cases, the selective breeding has led to all kinds of health issues for these birds. Broilers can hardly walk due to being fast-growing. Egg laying chickens have all kind of bone health problems due to producing lots of eggs (takes a lot of calcium to produce an egg shell)
this has been your daily vegan post.
Lil’ nuggets => McNuggets
Can’t win the argument? Have you tried posting content likely to upset to argue your case in communities unrelated to your cause?
?
196 is a meme/miscellaneous community. This is a meme ergo fits within the community. Pretty much the only rule of this community is “if you visit the community you must post” besides rules like no transphobia, racism, etc.
Don’t worry, that person is a “devils advocate” for Israel, Russia, and Trump so their opinion doesn’t matter here.
Oh fun skimming through their comments shows them also dissmising climate change effects too. Comments downplaying a senario of +5°C average temperature increase
Classic
i dont mind
Of course you don’t. You’re told your entire life that eating animals is essential and morally permissible. You’re constantly told your entire life that animal lives don’t matter. Just keep an open mind. Go to watchdominion dot com.
I’d think they could genetically engineer the egg layers to only produce males in certain conditions (such as when they’re incubated at a higher temperature), then only breed males when they need more roosters.
OR, if sex is selected by sperm type (as with humans) artificially inseminate the hens.
I suspect there are dozens of valid technical solutions that are cost effective and would allow them to not shred male chicks.
Every vegan initially dreams of a world with ethical meat. Then after a few years you realize you actually don’t miss meat at all. Please believe me when I say, ethical meat really isn’t worth the effort (and often mental gymnastics).
For now, to paraphrase Marge Simpson, I can’t afford to choose a diet that has a philosophy I’m sure that yes, unprocessed vegetable matter is cheap if I know where to go, but turning that into a run of meals that doesn’t trigger my major depression and suicidality is simply not feasible. Also there’s the concern that when I endeavor to do complicated things and fuck up, the cost of the disaster is exponentially greater than the cost of not doing it in the first place.
In short, getting ten pounds of legumes would be a great way for me to ruin ten pounds of legumes and stink up the street block.
I’ve heard that people who actually know how to cook are able to do wonderful things with vegetable matter. But I do not have access to them, and their pre-processed products at the store are more expensive than meat and eggs.
Sometimes I fantasize about a society in which one’s status as a person wasn’t contingent on how much money I make for someone else, who is glad to give me a tiny portion of that take, but we are a few generations, and a couple of great filters away from such a pipe dream.
You’re thinking about turtles
They don’t scale super well at the moment. See my comment elsewhere about just that
I raised mine to roosters. I got a grey cock, a brown cock, and the biggest is my black cock.
My wife wants to know your location
34 wallaby way
42069 Rooster Rock Way
Did they use the chickens for something? I guess cat food or something like that would be useful.
Chicken nuggets are made this way.
Didn’t they use the bones and cartilage for that?
Chicken lips and hooves.
deleted by creator
Never understood this. Why not raise the roosters for their meat and feathers and leave the hens for laying eggs?
I presume, like everything else wrong with Capitalism, it comes down to cost. It’s more cost efficient somehow. I don’t understand the details, because I’m not a chicken farmer, but I have been in the capitalism machine for a long, long time, and I’d bet a shitton of tax payer money that it’s purely down to cost.
If it saves $0.02 per chicken, they’ll gladly poison the rivers, oceans, lakes, etc. with refuse and baby chick corpses.
In this case it’s because if you raised them no-one would want to buy them. The egg laying breeds are a lot tougher and have a lot less meet than the ones bred for meat. They also cost more per amount of meat in the end.
The simple fact is that people don’t want to buy that, so it’d just be wasteful to grow them out.
Right. So cost savings.
Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.
Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.
The hens are bred for laying as much eggs as possible, on the cost of meat production. this means, that it isn’t profitable to raise them, just to get some meat, when you can raise other chicken breads to get twice the amount of meat.
I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.
So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.
I am guessing, only based on the fact that the immorally fast growing chickens only make a few more cents, that they are not profitable.
Also I am not sure if roosters can be kept together past a certain point maybe?
I have been seeing a lot of animal abuse posts on here lately. I hadn’t noticed 196 being like that in the past on here or Reddit. Is there a trend toward that for this community in general? I’m well aware of how fucked the industry is, but I also don’t sub to this community for that. I am here for little gay people shit posting in my phone. These just make me sad. I can’t personally do anything to stop this. I don’t want to unsub, and there’s not a great way to filter, unless it’s all the same OP? :(
It might still not be popular to be vegan yet, but the movement is growing rapidly. It could be a symptom of a larger trend - that the injustices against non-human animals is too terrible to keep Ignoring.
Sometimes it just needs to be recognized that a problem isn’t going to go away until we start doing the hard work of solving it together.
the movement is growing
google trends says otherwise
That also wasn’t my point at all. I’m making no statement here about veganism. I’m saying 196 isn’t a vegan activism community and these bummer posts are obnoxious.
Trolls found out they can post here with impunity, so they do so.
You can go vegan and stop giving these people money
this won’t stop the fact it’ll keep happening and keep making people sad
But feeling guilty as well as sad would be even worse
vystopia isnt any fun either
I’d rather be an unhappy vegan than a happy meat eater.
I’d rather be happy
Yeah maybe but the infohazard got to us. We know too much and now we can only really choose between being a guilty meat eater or a depressed vegan.
You sound like queer people in the 80s and 90s.
“What does it matter if one person accepts me? Won’t change anything and it just bums me out.”
Now, acceptance is the default position for most folk.
as a queer person in the now I do not think this is comparable, at all.
Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.
This is emphatically untrue. If you eat a few hundred fewer animals over the course of your life, that’s a few hundred animals saved (even if supply and demand aren’t perfectly elastic, the expected utility is 1-to-1). The fact that billions will still die is irrelevant.
Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?
Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?
this is a terrible analogy because at the end of one, you can point to the person being saved. no animals are saved by eating plants.
Good point. I don’t think it changes my argument though. If anything, allowing a creature to come into existence just so that it can be slaughtered is way more fucked up than exploiting an existing person.
you’ll forgive me if, in turn, i think your values are “fucked up.”
Yes, it’s not my responsibility to save that child from poverty. I would also be terrible at it. I would much rather financially support organizations than will assist in saving children from poverty in a more meaningful way, as well as supporting politicians that align with my values as far as lifting not just children, but everyone, out of poverty.
You can, and should, give money to animal charities and support politicians in favor of better animal welfare (if you can find one) and I will commend you for that. But that does not negate the harm you do by paying for animals to be killed. Just as giving to a women’s shelter does not then mean that it becomes excusable for you to beat your wife.
And I apologize for that analogy, I don’t think you’re a bad person. But I do think it’s an appropriate analogy and I think we live in a culture that normalizes and encourages normal people to participate in terrible atrocities. The reality is that you have nothing to lose from going vegan and, after a little research and preparation, it doesn’t take any extra effort, time, or money.
paying for animals to be killed
almost no one does that.
Buying meat is paying for animals to be killed. Just like buying flour is paying for wheat to be grown.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Well, difficult.
Veganism isn’t difficult. And yeah my tofu exploits people in the third world, but the beef I used to eat was fed soy anyways. You’re just removing a one really horrible and unnecessary step from the food supply chain.
_ more ethical | | | | | | | | | | | |
That analogy goes so far above what’s happening, at least for the average person.
Do you buy jeans or any clothing produced outside of the US? BAM, you’re as bad as the people in the factories abusing local communities and child labor.
Should one attempt to find clothing that is ethical where possible? Then absolutely, and buying a pair of Levi’s doesn’t make you complicit in enabling child endangerment.
Same with most things, I try my best to already only buy from brands that don’t: support genocide through funding or messaging, discriminate based on sex/race/gender, engage in union busting or union restrictive activities, employ under the table for children or for tax/benefit reductions. So many people try to argue from a place of Absolute Moral Supremacy, and the world is just too grey for that.
Reduce the meat you eat, yes, that’s a good plan and it’s good for the budget and it’s good for the planet. But humans HAVE been eating animals for longer than we’ve walked upright, so going entirely non-consumption just isn’t going to happen.
You can make stances as to why it’s a good thing, why it might assist you in the long run, but to conflate it with enabling violence towards spouses? That’s the kind of rhetoric that gets vegans shouted down and laughed at anytime the name is brought up. If you want to make long lasting change, changing hearts and minds will do that, and your tone/style won’t win hearts and minds.
First off, I have a tendency to be an asshole in online discussions so I want you to call me out if I’m being unproductive. I also really struggle with tone so please try to interpret what I say generously. This is why I generally only discuss veganism irl. This is a throwaway account I created just because I saw some anti vegan rhetoric and my emotions got the better of me. I’m going to abandon it as soon as we’re done talking. Here it goes:
As for you last point, I want you to consider things a vegan’s perspective for a second. You’re often forced to either package your ideas so meekly and inoffensively that they’re easily ignored or express them forcefully and then be called an extremist and mocked.
We slit the throats of 90 billion land animals each year. That’s billions of chickens who get theirs beaks cut off without anesthetic and get ammonia burns from living in their own shit. Billions of bulls that are branded, ear tagged, and have their testicles ripped off without anesthetic. Trillions of fish that suffocate to death or freeze to death in ice water.
And the absurdity of it all is that it’s easy, cheap, and healthy to simply eat plants. Most people can wash their hands of this entirely any time they want. The idea that none of this is ethical or necessary is an idea that deserves to be presented forcefully. The idea that animals are not property to be owned and exploited is no different from the idea that human beings cannot be property of their masters or their husbands and deserves to be expressed with the same vigor. So is it really that people hate us because we’re presenting our message wrong, or do people just hate us because our message is hard to hear?
I agree with most of your other points. Capitalism does force us all to be complicit in terrible things to a degree and I’m sure I absolutely could and should do more to avoid exploitative products. In fact, if you have a list of products that you avoid or a source you consult, I’d like know what it is. And if you’re willing to do research on the least explorative brand of jeans, then you really should go vegan. This is an easy win and I guarantee you it’s cheaper.
As for the “humans have eaten meat forever” argument. Humans have had slaves forever yet you are clearly against slavery. If you go vegan and prevent a dozen cows from being raised and killed for meat, that’s worthwhile regardless of what everyone else does.
The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It’s going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable
And with systematic action, it’s still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We’re going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption
The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there’s been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
Couldn’t that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn’t going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.
If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you’ll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!
Yeah, you should go vegan, and also post depressing memes on 196 that make all the carnists feel guilty. That’ll have a bigger impact.
yeah i feel you. i don’t think this would be better even if i were vegan (i’m not bc i think i would starve due to a number of dietary restrictions /allergies, but i cycle in the vegan food i can)
Pretty sure it’s mostly the one poster
I can’t personally do anything to stop this.
You can always upvote or share a post like this to spread awaraness and hence maybe make people buy less eggs, or at least make them pause to think before they buy their next eggs.
“i don’t want to see shit like this”
“you can upvote it so more people see shit like this as well”
thanks, very cool
Yes, so that maybe some day in the future this horrible shit is no more. Until then, get used to bumping into a thought provoking meme every now. The mild discomfort pales in comparison to the practice itself.
Don’t they gender the eggs now? They just don’t hatch the male ones.
AS far AS i know, there are experiments with identifying the gender in the egg, but it isn’t practically usable on a big scale. I might be wrong, would love if someone knew more about this.
Only in a select few places. It doesn’t scale super well among other potential issues
They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.
[…]
One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling
I mean shredding males to nuggets is also financially viable.
I mean shredding males to nuggets is also financially viable.
Vegans when you don’t listen to them
To shreds you say? How’s his mother holding up?
To tendies you say
