Germany’s chick cull ban is no cause for celebration
A ban on baby male chicks being macerated or gassed soon after birth that could spread from Germany to other European countries - that sounds excellent, right? Sadly, it is not nearly far enough and could even be a distraction from the real issues.
As vegans, we are all too familiar with the videos of male chicks falling from conveyor belts into a macerating machine and being ground up alive, or stuffed into plastic bags and suffocated or gassed. Documentaries like Land of Hope and Glory and Dominion, plus the work of a great many animal campaign groups, have brought to light this appalling practice where chicks are so callously disposed of simply for being born male and so have no monetary value to egg producers beyond the few needed for breeding.
As such we’d be forgiven for celebrating the news that Germany has approved a draft bill that will ban the killing of day-old male chicks from next year, either by shredding or gassing, a world-first that is already having a knock-on effect with France set to follow suit.
We’d be forgiven for hoping that the lives of the estimated 45 million chicks killed each year in Germany would be saved. But the reality is that we really don’t have any cause to celebrate.
Rather than saving their lives, male chicks will simply never be hatched, as a German court ruled in 2019 that the ban could only come into force after a way was found to determine the sex of an embryo while still in the egg. This technology now exists, giving the egg industry a way to continue exploiting chickens for their reproductive cycles.
German-Dutch start-up Seleggt, with funding from the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, has pioneered a method of sexing a chicken embryo whereby a laser cuts a tiny hole in the shell and the allantoic fluid inside is tested for female hormones. Eggs that are sexed male or unfertilised are turned into high-quality feed for farm animals. This method of sexing an egg is already taking place commercially with eggs stamped with the ‘respeggt’ logo having been sold in supermarkets in Berlin since November 2018.
Furthermore, German producers have another strategy available to them - the so-called ‘dual-use chicken’ by which a male chick is raised and fattened to be eaten like non-egg laying broiler hens.
On the one hand, the Seleggt technology is slow and expensive, putting a financial strain on many producers. Industry representatives have spoken out about the practicality of this technology and have called for the ban to be put on hold until a method of mass identification can be found.
According to the president of Germany’s Central Poultry Industry Association (ZDG), Friedrich-Otto Ripke - who apparently also wants an end to chick culling but is in favour of a mass identification method - the ban can easily be bypassed by producers importing chicks from other countries. Speaking to the newspaper NOZ, Ripke said: “Chick killing for young and laying hens used in Germany would continue abroad.”
This would effectively transfer the problem and bolster the chicken exploitation industry elsewhere - and without an EU-wide ban, eager chick producers wouldn’t be hard to find nor far away. Switzerland for example has banned maceration, but not gassing of male chicks, and there are plenty of other countries within the European trading bloc.
“Sexed eggs or not, the exact same number of female chickens will go on to become egg-laying hens.”
The response from animal rights and welfare organisations has been somewhat mixed and confusing. In 2018, Seleggt won Compassion in World Farming’s (CIWF) best innovation award, and Philip Lymbery, the head of CIWF, said he would “very much look to a post-Brexit Britain to be a genuine leader in animal welfare, which should include outlawing the killing of male chicks of the egg-laying strain.”
The European advocacy group Foodwatch, in stark contrast, resonates more with our own view on this but still not quite there. Speaking to the Guardian, executive director Martin Rücker said: “If only the cruel practice of killing chicks in Germany is ended, this will change absolutely nothing about the unbearable suffering of laying hens.”
However, Rücker was only commenting on intensive chicken farming, implying that “high welfare” production at all stages was the solution: "Anyone who wants animal welfare must put an end to the animal-cruelty madness of high-performance hens.”
This is really what it boils down to: the egg sexing method is applauded by those who want to see fewer chicks killed each year, but from a rights-based perspective, it will not bring about the abolition of the exploitation of chickens. If anything, it will just facilitate its continuation albeit in a more palatable way, with less guilt for the average consumer, as is the marketing appeal of all welfare labelling.
If there are any winners here, it would appear to be the marketers, because it certainly isn’t the chickens. Eggs brandishing the ‘respeggt’ label on their packaging have been referred to in press communications as “cruelty-free” or simply “no-kill”, presenting Seleggt-sexed eggs as the actual ethical consumer choice. But what does that actually look like? Yes, in a sense it is something to note that governments are accepting the reality of animal production and seeking to change things, but sexed eggs or not, the exact same number of female chickens will go on to become egg-laying hens.
The same countless millions of sentient individuals each year will be debeaked with hot blades before spending their lives in cramped, filthy sheds either caged or passed off as cage-free and free-range. The only existence they know will be laying more than 300 eggs a year due to their selective breeding, far more than the 10 to 15 or so their wild ancestors would have laid, making them susceptible to bound eggs, egg yolk peritonitis and other health conditions for which they will receive no veterinary care. A ban on male chick culling only shifts the problem elsewhere and sadly does nothing to prevent the living hell to which we humans subject other chickens.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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