A new process, Seleggt, can determine the sex of a chick before it hatches from the egg, avoiding the culling of unwanted male chicks in the egg industry (which often happens by feeding live chicks into shredding machines). The first eggs produced using the process are on sale in Berlin.
Using the new process, unhatched male embryos and their eggs are still destroyed and are processed into animal feed, but this happens after nine days of incubation instead of after hatching (which happens at 21 days). Seleggt argues that, while there is disagreement over the day at which an incubating embryo can begin to feel pain, it is likely that significantly less pain is caused by the Seleggt process than by killing a day-old chick.
Read the full story here. See also the Foodsource building block What is animal welfare?
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