Humane Hurdle #2: Sorry, Dudes

But then we faced another inconvenient hurdle of biology: half of all chicks are born male. Why is this a problem? Well, due to modern selective breeding, egg-laying strains differ from meat production strains. Male birds of the former do not actually lay eggs, being boys and all, yet also won’t grow large enough to justify their food and lodging. So what do we do?

Brace yourself for this particularly shameful solution: chick culling. Typical methods include cervical dislocation, asphyxiation, and maceration in a high-speed grinder. For real. Billions of newly hatched, adorable, fluffy yellow chicks – the ultimate symbol of vulnerable innocence – are routinely disposed of in this unthinkable, bloody, violent manner.

(And on Easter, we celebrate the symbol of chicks while decorating eggs. Please stop and think for a second about how utterly f*cked up this is.)

I understand most people would never condone this and it’s hard to accept – this can’t be real, because people wouldn’t stand for this… right? Yet the fact is most people have not the foggiest clue this is even going on, including myself for most of my life, despite it being standard practice and not denied whatsoever (but not exactly advertised) by the egg industry.

United Egg Producers spokesman Mitch Head has said, "There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens. If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need." Using a grinder, Head said, "is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks."

After getting over the initial shock, you may hope this doesn’t happen on small farms. Yet chick culling is standard practice – it happens at the hatcheries, before the chicks even get to the farm or homeowner's backyard. Even My Pet Chicken, who "lead the way in urban chicken space" and pride themselves on being "humane," admits to doing it (which they deceptively frame as "euthanizing".) This is because, again, half of all chicks are born male, regardless of how “free” their sisters may temporarily be. It’s biology and math. And consumers just don't want male chicks of this breed. There is a socially-ingrained expectation that even pet chickens will lay eggs. Yet we don't require this of other pets like dogs and cats – to be fertile females who provide human-manipulated edible secretions.

Although small farms raising animals for food have become lionized, they are not manned by magicians, and they also exist solely to profit from animals’ flesh and fluids – none of which humans actually have any need to consume.

Yet our desire and false sense of need to eat the unfertilized eggs of female birds requires male chicks to be continuously hatched and immediately killed in an endless cycle behind the scenes.

Even Comedian Aziz Ansari has said, if more people actually knew about this, “We’d all check ‘no’ on that box. But the problem is this kind of information, this kind of footage, it just hasn’t been seen in the right context to elicit… mass outrage.” View this surprising moment in his performance at the end of this article.