Breaking: France Bans Egg Industry from Crushing and Gassing Male Chicks From 2022

In a world-first, France will join Germany in the prohibition of culling male chicks following years of protests over ethical concerns.

Male chicks in the egg industry will no longer be gassed or crushed to death in France from next year, according to the country’s agricultural minister Julien Denormandie. 

The move comes after decades of protests from animal welfare activists who have denounced the practice as inhumane and barbaric.

Together with Germany - who banned the culling of male chicks by May 2022 - France will be “the first country in the world to put an end to the killing of male chicks,” said Denormandie.

Chicken meat comes from “broiler” chickens who are selectively bred to grow as unnaturally big as fast as possible. They’re usually slaughtered when they're just 5-6 weeks old. Eggs, however, are sourced from egg-laying hens. These are females who have been bred to produce high volumes of eggs, typically around 300 a year - a stark difference to wild hens who naturally lay only 10 to 15 eggs annually. In the wild, these hens can live 10 to 15 years, but those in the egg industry are slaughtered when their egg production begins to wane, typically at just 12- 18 months of age. These hens are typically used as pet food, feed for other factory-farmed animals, or “landfilled” because they have so little meat on them in comparison to broiler chickens.

As male chicks do not produce eggs, and do not yield as much meat as broiler chickens, they are deemed worthless in the eyes of the egg industry, and are suffocated to death or ground up alive in large industrial macerators. This occurs in all intensive egg production, whether free-range, organic, or battery. More than six billion newborn chicks are killed around the world every year, with the United States alone killing as many as 300 million.

Over the last two years, France and Germany have been working together to determine the best technological alternative that can replace the killing of unwanted chicks while working at an industrial scale.The choosen method can identify the sex of an egg weeks before the egg actually hatches by scanning the color of the embryo.

From 2022, breeders in France will be required to have installed or ordered machines that will detect the sex of chicks before they hatch.

“The technique of identifying the sex of the egg allows us to distinguish, through the shell, the feather colour of the male embryos, which is different to the females. In this way, we no longer have to eliminate 50 million male chicks just after they are born every year in France,” said Denormandie. “The dynamic is well underway and, given the orders already placed, the machines will be installed for two-thirds of production in France by the end of the first quarter of 2022.”

In addition, the state will provide a financial aid package of EUR€10 million (US$11.8 million) to help farmers buy the new equipment. The government is also working to ensure that the costs are fairly distributed across the supply chain. This will lead to an increase in the cost of a single box of six eggs by EUR€0.01.

France and Germany will also push for a similar measure at the European level and will try to convince their European Union partners to outlaw the practice. Already, Portugal, Spain, Austria, and Ireland have shown support for the move.

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