The other day I was reading a post in a popular online chicken forum in which someone was expressing horror and outrage at the idea that male day-old chicks are by the millions fed into machines that chop them to pieces while they’re alive. (This claim is true, by the way. The commercial chicken industry has machines built solely for this purpose and even has a technical word for this process: maceration.) You can follow the back and forth here. The responses ranged from outright denial, to insinuations of a vast vegan conspiracy, to a challenge to come up with a better method of dealing with the millions of unwanted male chicks that are produced each year.
Okay, I’ll bite. I accept that challenge. Here’s my modest proposal:
First, we need to completely abandon the chicken breeds that the commercial food industry routinely selects for production. The meat industry currently uses a Cornish/Rock hybrid that can go from egg to slaughterhouse in six weeks. The egg industry uses leghorn hens or some close variant. We need to say good-bye to these breeds that are completely unsuited for life outside an energy-intensive industrial agricultural model.
As an alternative, we need to identify the world’s best dual purpose auto-sexing chicken breed. I would guess that breed is the bielefelder. Bielefelders were developed by the Germans in the early 1960s with aim of producing the ultimate commercial chicken: huge and meaty, a prodigious egg layer, and the convenience of auto-sexing all wrapped up in one tightly engineered Teutonic package. To a remarkable degree the Germans succeeded in achieving their goal although the bielefelder is almost unknown outside Germany.
Assume the American commercial chicken market could re-orient itself to use the bielefelder as a meat bird and as an egg producer. Through the auto-sexing function chicks would easily be segregated by gender at hatching. Many of the females would be directed toward laying houses where they would produce a large volume of jumbo brown eggs. Almost all the males would be caponized and grown out as meat birds. A bielefelder capon would likely exceed ten pounds as a finished adult; a bountiful meal for even a large family. Ideally, these birds would be raised on pasture for months and then finished for a few weeks on a high-fat grain and dairy diet much like the vaunted Bresse chicken. Surplus females not needed by the egg industry would also be grown out as meat birds and would become fryers for smaller families in the mid-weight range of four pounds. A few select males and hens would be held back as breeders for the next generation.
Using this plan, we have now completely eliminated the need to kill male chicks as part of the commercial chicken production chain in America. And, the collateral benefits are immense: the American consumer will eat far better-tasting and healthier chicken, American workers can learn and profit from the art of raising pastured chicken, and we can extend our moral consideration to a species that doesn’t deserve to be shoved alive into the spinning blades of a giant industrial grinder. It is also numerically much more efficient. We would no longer be dedicating feed, time, and money to an industrial system that produces a stream of chicks that have little market value and are immediately killed as soon as they begin life.
Will this scheme increase the price of chicken in the supermarket? Yes, it will. It would probably about double the cost of bringing a bird to market. Will it reduce the hidden secondary costs of cheap chicken? Again, it will. Healthier chicken probably results in lower downstream medical costs for those who eat it. A pastured poultry approach simultaneously reduces the costs of the environmental impacts of raising chickens. Manure becomes an asset and not a liability, and lower stocking densities reduce or eliminate the need for antibiotics in the chicken feed. And, this plan addresses the less definite but undeniable moral cost of our current arrangement. Will it allow people of conscience to sleep better at night knowing they aren’t part of a system that supports the kind of waste and pain we currently see in commercial chicken factories? Hopefully.
August 3, 2012 at 10:44 am
I’ve thought about that also and was just reading that thread. This country is brought up to get instant gratification. They ignore what they don’t want to see (it doesn’t exist, it never happened).
I only have a few birds myself and have not had to process any(yet), but it makes sense to have a meaty bird and a great egg laying hen all in the same breed.
What would we have to do to convince the big producers of that? There are still some towns that don’t approve of ANY chicken ownership. That would be the best way to teach people where their food comes from (small farms NOT the mass produced!
August 9, 2012 at 6:15 pm
If this horrible news is true? What are they using the ground up chicks for?
Cynthia
August 9, 2012 at 6:30 pm
Yes, it is true. Frequently the ground-up male chicks are used for animal feed.
Maceration is a common practice in industrial chicken hatcheries that extends to hundreds of millions of male birds each year. There is actually quite a bit of science behind the practice (governing the rate at which live birds are fed into the machine, etc.) but for obvious reasons the ‘optics’ of cutting up live chicks keep it a process that hatcheries strive to hide from public view. Here is some info on the practice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
August 17, 2012 at 7:52 am
I love that you love your chickens. I call mine zobime-demons-from-hell. My sister has some backyard chickens. Actually, they belong to her 15 year old son. He is fascinated with chickens, asked for (and got) an incubator for Christmas last year and is now in business of incubating chicks for others and selling eggs. They had a chicken hatch last spring that was the most people friendly bird. They called her Lucy. She loved hanging out with them, sitting on their laps etc. We helped them cull their roosters last summer when they discovered their voices (she lives in a suburban neighborhood) and low and behold, Lucy, no longer having any competition, discovered she was actually a he. She quickly turned from sweet loving hen to loud, obnoxious, mean, territorial rooster. My sister couldn’t go into her backyard without being attacked. They no longer called her Lucy. They felt Lucifer was more fitting. Believe it or not, Lucifer still rules the roost in that backyard.
August 25, 2012 at 4:30 am
Why do they not do what the breeders of Fighting/Game chickens have done for Years . Look closely at the eggs .
I learned to tell when someone told me and it is not hard to know your our come tested it many times and i get 1 cockeral if thats what i want and how ever many hens i want ,
THIS is for my Egg/meat chickens was an Old timer who taught me .
Sex the eggs would work better then throwing the breeds out with the male chicks ….
OR send them off to starving countries or those who want Donations to feed the Hungry have them take some of the cash they keep as payment for a ob well done and buy some of the cockerals raising them fr food buying some hens and Feeding these people . Have a nice day Tammy
September 4, 2012 at 4:14 pm
I suppose maceration if better than tossing them live into a huge plastic garbage bag, tying it up and disposing of the chicks into a dump.
They are both horrific practices. I like the idea of raising cockerels as meat, with a healthy lifestyle as they grow. However, the practice of caponization makes me cringe, also.
We’ve received all our chicks from a business which is known for it’s high ability to separate the males from females. But now I am rethinking this entire scenario. I just don’t want to be involved in any activity which encourages such brutality to animals.
I’ve had to cull two of our hens who were sick. Though quickly done, it was not pleasant at all, especially as they were our pets. I believe I’d have a hard time doing this as a routine with any cockerels we may have.
September 12, 2012 at 4:10 pm
In conjunction with your stated plan, USDA-inspected facilities need to be available in every state for people wanting their own flocks processed for resale and should offer “processing packages” for people wanting less than the standard thousands from large meat distributors. This would allow localized production of meat for resale, trimming some of the overhead transportation costs that get lumped into the overall cost of meat available. Having approved facilities capable of handling small orders would really put power in the hands of small-scale produces.
October 31, 2012 at 1:13 am
I like your plan. Ultimately though i believe that abandoning the prevalent commercial food industry is probably the best bet – supporting local small farms who are producing meat and eggs from pastured heritage breeds. so the model already exists it is really about coughing up the cash for the $20 or more chicken. But hey if people are offended by the practice of maceration this is what they can be supporting or a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle.
i like the idea of using many breeds as opposed to one breed being used though. I’m sure these Bielefelders are some nice birds but if they were used exclusively it would be at the expense of all of the other heritage breeds – not much different than our current situation when considering loss of heritage breeds.
December 14, 2012 at 11:27 pm
My very first job was at a commercial hatchery,back in 1971. The first week I worked there I had to help drown thousands of dayolds because an order was cancelled! We employees took home as many as we could find homes for until one greedy person decide to sell what he took and then they wouldn’t allow us to take anymore! That was the hardest ( mentaly) job I believe I ever had. I still get mad at a commercial mentality that would rather destroy so many instead of just giveing them to people that could have used them(we were in a rural area) Unfortunately that same mentality goes on today too.
March 16, 2013 at 7:01 am
I was recently given an antique caponizer (if that is the correct word) that was passed down in my family. Is this a practice that farmers used to raise meat on family farms? Do people now take their chicks to a vet to have this done? I don’t think I have the heart to kill any babies but I already have more roosters than I want. Anyway, good solution. Here’s to wishing that doing it right would win out over corporate profit!
March 24, 2013 at 1:32 pm
I’m gonna make a hatchery/breeder/egg/chicken farm that’s not a big factory, because it’s meat and eggs the males will be killed for meat when they’re older. I think I’m gonna import natural chicken landraces to “start” new breeds, landraces that actually exist but don’t have a name, they are in more danger than normal rare breeds, and cheaper to buy because no one thinks they’re a rare breed (still huge import costs though). They won’t just be bred to breed standard, they will be bred to be healthy, lay lots of eggs, have good meat, and sometimes go broody (no sustainable breed doesn’t go broody)
I hate chicken factories that just keep the chickens in tiny cages or in an extremely crowded room. They wouldn’t have to buy that much food for the few who are near the food trough (the rest die) if they let them free range. Most of the chickens in factory farms die and they don’t get to make a profit (unless you sell that dead possibly diseased chicken) Even if they say “cage free” or “free range” on the packaging, they only need to be uncaged/outside for a VERY short time to be allowed to say it. There needs to be more natural chicken farmers that free range their chickens and use sustainable breeds, not just leghorns and rhode island reds and bone-breakin’ broilers and barred rocks (Actually barred rocks are pretty good compared to the other popular breeds; I’ve had a lot of barred rocks and they make good eggs and meat, but are too popular now and the newer factory ones don’t go broody as much)