In order to stop the killing of millions of male chicks, Israeli researchers are pursuing a new approach: they want to use genetic engineering to ensure that only female chicks are produced. Animal rights activists doubt the sustainability of the idea. In addition, the method is highly controversial in Europe.
In modern agriculture, male chicks from laying hens are nothing more than an annoying by-product – and killing them has caused outrage among animal rights activists for years and is also a cost factor. Israeli researchers are now working to prevent this by-product from occurring in the first place: by using gene methods to develop laying hens from whose eggs only female chicks hatch.
The team from the agricultural research organization Volcani Center relies on 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,” said Cinnamon.
So far, male chicks of laying hens have mostly been shredded or gassed immediately after hatching. This has been banned in Germany since the beginning of 2022, and there are also efforts in this direction in other countries and at EU level. So far, however, there are no good alternatives.
In fact, the organization Foodwatch suspects that male chicks in Germany are now being transported abroad in large numbers, where they may then be killed after all. According to consumer advocates, the whereabouts of millions of male chicks hatched in Germany this year are completely unclear. Actually, as so-called brother cocks, they should be raised together with the hens.
Technologies that can determine the sex of chicks in the egg are another possibility. However, Cinnamon considers these methods to be insufficiently reliable. In addition, the effort of screening all and disposing of the unwanted eggs remains. 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 US-Israeli company Huminn, which is collaborating with researchers at Volcani Center, the technology could be commercialized in two years.
Aside from the welfare benefits, the technology could offer poultry farmers huge savings in the space and energy required to run incubators, while also reducing the significant cost of disposing of the male chicks. “It costs a dollar to cull each male chick, so that’s a savings of seven billion a year,” Cinnamon calculates.
However, it is questionable whether this is a solution for German and European farmers. For one thing, genome editing is a legal gray area. The use of genetically modified organisms (GMO) for food production is largely banned in the EU, but the classification of living beings modified by genome editing as GMOs is controversial.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided in 2018 that plants modified by mutagenesis – a type of genome editing – are to be classified as GMOs. However, the EU Commission is in favor of a reform of the previous strict genetic engineering directive, since according to studies new genetic engineering processes could “contribute to a more sustainable food system”.
On the other hand, the criticism of environmental and animal rights activists on the system of keeping laying hens is more fundamental: Even if no more male chicks were killed, this would not change the “unbearable conditions in German chicken coops,” explained Foodwatch, for example. Rather, what is needed is a “real system reorganization” away from “high-performance breeding that tortures animals” – and a move away from the strict classification of chickens for meat and egg production.
