9 days after an egg has been fertilised
January 2, 2019 3:05 PM   Subscribe

World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin "Chick’s sex can be determined before it hatches, potentially ending culling of billions of males"

"The patented “Seleggt” process can determine the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised. Male eggs are processed into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period."

[Previously: Chick sexing in 2017; in 2007.]
posted by readinghippo (36 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
so a seleggt in nine saves time?
posted by pyramid termite at 3:09 PM on January 2, 2019 [11 favorites]


I often pass Sexing in College Station, Texas, where they sort cattle sperm. I have wondered if other methods are out there to get the desired gender of livestock.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 3:19 PM on January 2, 2019


I've seen various technologies deployed for this. It's really a shameful practice that can be avoided with a little investment, but like most legacy food industries they will wait until the last possible moment to do so. But I'm guessing in 10 or 15 years it will be standard, since there are plenty of benefits.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:22 PM on January 2, 2019 [9 favorites]


Not soon enough.
posted by Splunge at 3:42 PM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


I had no idea this was a problem
posted by es_de_bah at 3:43 PM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


E...xcellent news. [ twitch ]
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:05 PM on January 2, 2019 [12 favorites]


I wonder if one of the drivers is that chick sexing is (shockingly) high-paid job that not enough people seem to want? (2015 article, may not be current?)
posted by litleozy at 4:09 PM on January 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


But it doesn’t save chicken lives if you believe that chicken life starts at conception.
posted by vorpal bunny at 4:16 PM on January 2, 2019 [25 favorites]


There’s the old saw about “If abbatoirs had glass walls, there would be more vegetarians”.

Image search “Chick conveyor belt”. When you know there’s a wood-chipper waiting at the end, you understand why being a sexer is a job looking for workers.

I would pay a premium for non-wood-chipper eggs.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 4:39 PM on January 2, 2019 [24 favorites]


Maybe the broiler chicken can be dethroned as the most populous bird.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:47 PM on January 2, 2019


No-kill? So, the hens will not be sent to slaughter when their egg production declines well before the end of their natural lifespan?

Don’t get me wrong—I’m very glad about this development. But there’s plenty of other suffering and death in the commercial egg production process, and describing these eggs as “no-kill” seems deliberately meant to mislead people who care about animals.
posted by Gymnopedist at 5:26 PM on January 2, 2019 [11 favorites]


I think anyone familiar enough with where eggs come from to know this is a problem, also know that laying hens aren't retired to a small farm in Upstate New York owned by a kindly retired couple from Liege, Belgium.
posted by 1adam12 at 6:41 PM on January 2, 2019 [2 favorites]


describing these eggs as “no-kill” seems deliberately meant to mislead people who care about animals

Agreed, the name is non-sense.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:54 PM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


Maybe it should be marketed as "Thanos"
posted by nikaspark at 7:29 PM on January 2, 2019 [5 favorites]


(sorry I couldn't help myself and I really don't know what the distribution of hens/roosters are I'm assuming 50%? At any rate it's an awful pun sorry marvel fans out there)
posted by nikaspark at 7:30 PM on January 2, 2019


But it doesn’t save chicken lives if you believe that chicken life starts at conception.

Oeuf.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 7:45 PM on January 2, 2019 [20 favorites]


nikaspark that's a fascinating question, and I had never thought about it myself!

The answer surprised me, it depends, rather a lot based on breed, age, and whether the embryo survives to hatching. In general, it's pretty 50/50 as one expects.

A lot of embryos don't survive to hatching, and this study is kind of unexpected to me. Female embryos are less likely to survive to hatching but certain hens had much higher ratio of female offspring. I can't be bothered to look into the methodology, but it's a PCR chromosomal analysis so if it was done ok, that's pretty reliable. But again, I suspect it depends on breed.

The differential survival of male/female embryos seem to be mediated through incubation temperature, also.
posted by porpoise at 8:00 PM on January 2, 2019


I always thought that the male chicks went off to be fed for the few months it would take for them to be big enough to eat. Why is it more economically effective to kill them instead?
posted by Daily Alice at 8:15 PM on January 2, 2019 [3 favorites]


I also don't believe for a second that this is about humane-ness or anti-animal cruelty.

Eggs take up rack space, each rack space costs $/h. If the cost of spectroscopic sexing of eggs is less than cost of the rack space to hatching and the time required to sex the hatchling, then it's purely a matter of saving production costs.

Many regulated Cannabis cultivation operations are limited by the regulations in "canopy space" (square footage allowed for cultivation) and even illegal operations are constrained by the cost/sqft/hour in lighting/cooling costs so breeding programs benefit from PCR sexing of seedlings because you can identify the sex within days of sproutling instead of waiting for weeks or months since the tests cost a lot less than cumulative vegetative growth costs especially if you already have existing infrastructure, or infrastructure to support multiple sites/ operations.

(Yes, sometimes you want to carry certain markers through a male lineage, but if you're doing PCR-based marker-assisted selection anyway, sexing the sprout only adds pennies in cost to each sprout tested.)
posted by porpoise at 8:16 PM on January 2, 2019 [6 favorites]


male chicks went off to be fed for the few months

Capons.
posted by porpoise at 8:17 PM on January 2, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah, this is clearly a way to cut costs and increase profit simultaneously. I admire the chutzpah.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 8:49 PM on January 2, 2019


"I always thought that the male chicks went off to be fed for the few months it would take for them to be big enough to eat. Why is it more economically effective to kill them instead?"

They're not bred to be raised for food. They're meant for eggs and are bred to that to the exclusion of all other traits. The male birds are really bad for meat.

Laying birds are not bred to be tasty, or even that uniform bland that most intensively farmed chicken tends to develop. They're also bred to stay relatively small and turn all their energy into eggs. This carries over to the males, who are just small and angry and you don't get enough weight on them compared to a broiler hen to make it worthwhile. Even if you do layer breed males grow, commercial broiler hens also hit killable weight at about six weeks or so. Six weeks. Growth rate is about three times as fast as laying birds, so you're taking a hit to your turnaround even before you factor in that they taste like garbage and have too little meat per bird. The economics is completely stacked against them.

Once upon a time, before we industrialized and optimized our farming systems you'd get farms that would sell the male birds as soon as they got too rowdy, and they'd taste fine because they were a more general purpose animal kept in fairly reasonable settings. These days what with the narrow margins for the growers they'd be operating at a loss to try and raise roosters for food.
posted by Jilder at 10:40 PM on January 2, 2019 [19 favorites]


Incidentally, watching meat chickens waddle/roll around as they try to stuff their faces even fuller of feed is one of the worst horrors of agriculture I've witnessed. I've heard of their legs breaking under their own weight.

Industrial breeds are frankenstein-like monsters, bred for a single purpose to the exclusion of everything else.

I keep heritage breeds so they can actually live what appear to be enjoyable lives.
posted by ragtag at 2:42 AM on January 3, 2019 [5 favorites]


The horrible contrasts between battery hens (lean, tiny things bred to lay twice a day, killed at a year if the conditions on their farm don't do it first) and broilers (hulks by six weeks, who keep growing beyond that to the point where their skeletons can't take the weight and the collapse under the mass of their own bodies ) was the catalyst for my complete abandonment of meat and the later full pass to veganism. My neighbours currently have a wee flock of four heritage birds bokking around their back yard; they're these deeply interesting, slightly deranged little balls of fluff that are just so satisfying to watch, and I can't help from time to time think to the industrial birds and how horrific their lives are by comparison. Then I feed the chookies something nice out the window, because I'm limited in what I can do for the other birds but I can damn well do what I can make sure that Pauline, Hillary Leelin and Lucy have rich lives.
posted by Jilder at 3:16 AM on January 3, 2019 [8 favorites]


I had never realised what happens to the male chicks, so although the 'no kill' label they've given these eggs is a bit of a reach (as people pointed out above, the old hens are still getting the chop eventually) I'm still glad they've done this, as the media spash they've created with this has highlighted an element of egg production that hasn't had much attention.

Industrial animal farming is a terrible terrible thing. Is these creatures had the ability to understand what we are doing to them, they would curse us for eternity.

See also other recent thread about the billions and billions of broiler chickens that are bred in cages every year
posted by memebake at 3:27 AM on January 3, 2019 [3 favorites]


It sounds like the process is a step to cut costs. It will be adopted not to be humane, but to be economically advantageous. OK by me either way.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:10 AM on January 3, 2019


The mass production of broiler chickens is terrifyingly efficient. I have always bought drumsticks at A$4.00 per kg, or whole chicken at that same price. Potatoes are almost the same price per kg! A whole cabbage is A$6.00! How is it possible to incubate, feed and take care of chickens, then slaughter and butcher and process them and keep them refrigerated during transport for less than it costs us to grow a cabbage and send it to the shop?
posted by xdvesper at 6:15 AM on January 3, 2019 [8 favorites]


My mom works for the PA Farm Show (helping to run a food stand) and the chicken folks there (some industry group promoting PA chicken farming) have live chicks at the farm show for the visitors to the farm show to interact with. They are small and fluffy and cute and they last the week of the farm show. Lots of people who might not otherwise ever do so get to see and hold a baby chick at the farm show because of this. On the whole, I think it's a good thing even if the only effect it has is helping people understand that there is a line, a pretty efficient, ruthless, and cruel line, that goes straight from fluffy yellow baby chick to boneless, skinless breast meat in a styrofoam tray at the grocery. (I don't think enough people really understand that every time they eat meat, something has died. And I do eat meat. Not tons, but some.)

However, at the end of farm show week, the baby chicks do not go back to the poultry producer that supplied them because they've spent a week at the bleedin' farm show and cannot go back to a poultry shed where they could infect thousands of meat birds with their weird farm show germs. The baby chicks also do not go off to a happy-ish life on a farm in the country because they are meat chicks and after about seven weeks they can barely walk under their own weight. We TRIED the "farm in the country" method of rescuing the display chicks. Yeahnope. It was honestly better to slaughter and eat them than to see them try to be chickens and fail. They can't really be chickens after a certain size. Also, plucking chickens by hand sucks.

So, the display baby chicks at the PA farm show spend a brief week in January (right now, as it happens) being fondled by strangers who might otherwise never get to touch a baby chick. And then, at the end of the farm show, when they cannot return to their industrial meat chicken life (such as it is) and are completely unsuited to farm life, they are drowned in a bucket.

Humans are not particularly kind to chickens and we haven't been for a very long time.
posted by which_chick at 6:35 AM on January 3, 2019 [11 favorites]


Perhaps selective breeding/genetic engineering haven't gone far enough. I wonder if they could skew the sex ratios of produced eggs; if they get one male per 10,000 females or so, that it would line up with economic requirements. Or even if they could get rid of the being-a-creature-capable-of-suffering part of the chicken, getting rid of limbs, eyes, and most of the brain and nervous system and ending up with a nicely modular, rack-mountable egg-chute, with an inlet for a nutrient pipe. Or perhaps not even its own circulatory system, but clean blood in/dirty blood out from a central pump at the head of the rack.

Which all sounds horrific, though would be a lot less horrific than industrial agriculture. Once people got used to this, the fact that birds were factory farmed to make eggs would seem barbaric.
posted by acb at 7:54 AM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


If these creatures had the ability to understand what we are doing to them, they would curse us for eternity.

Maybe they do, and they have. It would explain a lot.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 7:55 AM on January 3, 2019 [4 favorites]


I've heard the suggestion to create animals with a minimum cortex that would essentially be walking "meat machines". That seems to satisfy both economics and people who want the current animals to suffer less. I've also heard the prediction that it would trigger Frankenstein phobias in people and they would refuse to accept it even though it would be "better".

I'm just hoping this present period is short in the transition to some kind of vat protein "meat". I've always said that we as a culture will only transition to (mostly) vegetarian when it gets "easy".

Though I imagine there will be cults that keep to the "old" ways for a variety of reasons.
posted by aleph at 9:46 AM on January 3, 2019


Midnight Skulker, I happen to have a little STgenetics squeezy cow sitting next to me, and one of our former postdocs is a geneticist there. ST is a very interesting company, nd they spend a lot of money on research, which they receive from the licensing fees paid to them for every unit of sexed semen sold. The original technology for sorting X- from Y-bearing spermatozoa was developed by scientists at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Maryland. Right now, ARS scientists are on furlough.

acb, so far that’s (developing lines with dramatically skewed sex ratios) proven to be very difficult, which is why we sort semen.
posted by wintermind at 10:31 AM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


sort semen

Differential centrifugation or something more fancy like FACSorting?
posted by porpoise at 11:58 AM on January 3, 2019


The differential survival of male/female embryos seem to be mediated through incubation temperature, also.

I was just wondering about that! Also, there are species in which the incubation temperature determines their sex. Maybe those genes are ancestral to birds and could be turned on again?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:19 PM on January 3, 2019


If it is profitable and also ends a particularly grotesque and cruel practice, that's a win-win. I don't see the need to complain because it's not unprofitable. We need more stuff like this.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:42 PM on January 3, 2019 [3 favorites]


As a person who was raised about a hundred chickens or so over the past 10 years I can say most roosters are complete assholes. I love them because I love all living things but god damn do roosters make me work for it.
posted by nikaspark at 10:00 AM on January 4, 2019 [3 favorites]


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