It’s really easy to never consider where our food comes from. Industrialized farming isn’t something many of us want to discuss over a bucket of chicken. We just want to eat our chicken in peace, preferably without a side of guilt. It’s a lot more fun to talk about all the ingenuous ways we can prepare chicken. What’s even more fun to talk about is when an industry takes a big step forward in making some of the more unsavory aspects of farming more palatable.
United Egg Producers has just announced that they have the technology to stop culling rooster chicks by 2020. The UEP represent 95% of all egg producers in the United States. That makes this a huge step forward for chicken egg farming in America. Egg production is modeled around hatching hen chicks to be egg layers. The rooster chicks are… disposed of. By being ground up into pulp. Why yes, PETA does have something to say about this.
A German scientist has developed a scanning method to circumvent rooster chicks from ever being hatched in the first place. They will be using an in-ovo sexing technology to determine the sex of the embryo.
Dr Gerald Steiner, who is involved in the project, said the test involved using a laser beam to cut a small, circular hole at the top of the egg. Near-infrared spectroscopy is used to determine the sex of the embryo based on its DNA content, which is around 2% higher in male chicks.
Once the embryo is identified as male, it can be removed from the hatching process — thus saving the rooster chick from a one-day life and untimely death.
All of this is not to say there still aren’t cruelty issues within the industrial farming of chickens and their eggs, but this seems to be a step in the right direction.
(Via HuffPost Green)
