Male chicks of laying hens are no more than a nuisance by-product in modern livestock farming. Their murder has sparked outrage among animal rights activists for years and is also a cost factor. Israeli researchers are now trying to prevent this by-product from forming in the first place: by using genetic methods to develop laying hens from whose eggs only female chicks hatch.
The team of the agricultural research organization Volcani Center uses so-called genome editing, the targeted modification of DNA. Team leader Yuval Cinnamon sees this as the only way to significantly curb the mass killing of male chicks around the world. “This is a world first and the only solution that is easy for the industry to implement,” he told AFP news agency.
The shredding of chicks will be banned in Austria from 2023
Until now, male chicks from laying hens have usually been shredded or gassed immediately after hatching. This has been banned in Germany since early 2022, and efforts are being made in this direction in other countries and at EU level as well. However, so far there are no good alternatives. In Austria, the “senseless” killing of chicks will be banned from 2023.
Technologies that can determine the sex of the chicks in the egg are also possible. However, Cinnamon does not consider these methods to be sufficiently reliable. In addition, the effort to screen everything and discard the unwanted eggs remains.
Female embryos themselves are not genetically modified
Volcani Center is committed to genetically modifying laying hens so that male embryos do not develop and hatch. The female embryos, on the other hand, develop normally without being genetically modified themselves. According to the American-Israeli company Huminn, which collaborates with researchers at the Volcani Center, the technology could be commercialized within two years.
Aside from the welfare benefits, the technology can provide poultry farmers with huge savings in the space and energy required to run incubators, while also reducing the significant cost of removing the male chicks. “It costs a dollar to cull each male chick, so that’s a savings of $7 billion a year,” Cinnamon calculates.
However, the question is whether this is a solution for German and European farmers. For starters, genome editing is a legal gray area. The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for food production is largely banned in the EU, but the classification of genome-edited living beings as GMOs is controversial.
Environmental and animal rights activists advocate for more animal welfare
Environmental and animal rights activists are calling for more measures: even if male chicks were no longer killed, this would not change the “unbearable conditions in German chicken coops,” said Foodwatch, for example. Rather, what is needed is a “real system reorganization” away from “high-end breeding that tortures animals” – and a step away from the strict classification of chickens for meat and egg production.
Source: Krone
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