The American egg industry kills 350 million chicks a year. New technology offers an alternative

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WILTON, Iowa (AP) – Every year the U.S. egg industry kills about 350 million baby chicks because, while the fuzzy little animals are incredibly cute, they will never lay eggs, so they have little monetary value.

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That long-standing practice is changing, thanks to new technology that enables hatcheries to quickly identify millions of fertilized eggs and identify male embryos, then process them for further use before they mature into chicks. The program began operating this month in Iowa at the nation’s largest chicken hatchery, which handles about 387,000 eggs each day.

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“Now we’ve produced eggs ethically that we feel good about,” said Jörg Hurlin, managing director of Agri Advanced Technologies, a German company that spent more than a decade developing an SUV-sized machine that can separate eggs by sex.

Even Americans who are careful about buying free-range or free-range eggs are often unaware that hundreds of millions of baby chicks are killed each year, often when they are only one day old. Most of the animals are killed in a process called maceration that uses whirling blades to almost immediately kill the baby birds – something that seems gruesome but that the industry has long argued is the most humane method.

“Does the animal suffer? No, because death is sudden. But it’s not good because it’s a series of spinning blades,” said Suzanne Millman, a professor at Iowa State University who specializes in animal welfare.

The raising of chicks is the center of the poultry industry which has for decades raised one type of chicken for eggs and one for meat. Egg-laying chickens are too dense to be sold for meat at a profit, so the male chicks are processed and used as ingredients for other products.

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It wasn’t until European governments started passing laws against maceration that companies started to get confused about how to determine the sex of the chicken before the chicks hatched. Few companies can now do that, but unlike many competitors, the AAT machine does not need to pierce the shell and instead uses a bright light and sensitive cameras to determine the sex of the embryo by noting the coloration of the feathers. Men are white, and women are black.

This machine, called Cheggy, can process up to 25,000 eggs per hour, a speed that can accommodate the largest volume seen in hatcheries in the US. Besides the Cheggy machine in the small town of eastern Iowa, Wilton, a similar system has been installed in Texas. , both of Hy-Line’s North American hatcheries.

This technique has one major limitation: It only works on brown eggs because the male and female chicks on the white eggs have the same colored feathers.

That’s not much of a hindrance in Europe, where most eggs sold in stores are brown. But in the US, white shell eggs make up about 81% of sales, according to the American Egg Board. Brown shell eggs are especially sought after by people who buy cage-free, free-range and organic varieties.

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Hurlin said he thinks his company will develop a system to tell the sex of embryos from egg whites within five years, and other companies are working to meet what is expected to be a growing demand.

Eggs from hens tested using the new system will supply NestFresh Eggs, a Southern California-based business that distributes organic eggs produced by small operations across the country. The eggs will begin appearing on store shelves in mid-July and NestFresh vice president Jasen Urena said his company will begin recommending the new chick-friendly carton system and a major marketing effort.

“It’s a giant leap for animal welfare,” said Urena. “We have done a lot of work over the years on farms. How do we make the lives of these chickens better? Now we can go back to the hatching stage.”

Urena said the new system is more expensive but any price increase on store shelves will be minimal.

Animal welfare organization Mercy for Animals has been trying to draw attention to the killing of chicks for more than a decade in hopes of ending the practice.

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Walter Sanchez-Suarez, the group’s animal behavior and welfare scientist, said European laws banning the killing of chicks and new efforts to change the practice in the US are remarkable developments. However, Sanchez-Suarez sees them as a small step towards the larger goal of ending large-scale animal agriculture and providing alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy.

“Mercy for Animals thinks that this is an important step, but chicken producers should not stop there and should try to see all the additional problems related to this type of egg production practice,” he said. “Look for alternatives that are better for the animals themselves and the human consumers.”

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