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.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 99 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The technology for it that currently does not 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

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 21 points 5 months ago

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...

[–] Lileath@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 5 months ago

That is because it got forbidden. They never would do something that lessens their profit without being forced to do it.

[–] alx@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Schmoo@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 months ago

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.