PARIS: France’s exception to scrapping New Year’s resolutions Mass murder The number of male chicks would still allow millions to be killed, which worries animal rights activists.
Worldwide, more than six billion male chicks are killed each year because they cannot lay eggs or gain enough fat to sell for meat, according to the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.
French government after German leadership announced It will ban the practice of killing from January 1 this year.
Under the new rules, hatcheries must use in-ovo sexing technology – which determines the sex of unborn chicks – to prevent males from breeding in the first place.
But producers won permission to continue culling the offspring of male white chickens – more than 10% of the male chicks born each year in France – because it is more difficult to determine their sex.
Harvesting should be done with gas rather than traditional grinding techniques.
French animal rights group L214 has strongly objected to the exception, calling it “betrayal”.
Techniques used to identify the sex of unhatched chicks work better for some chicken breeds than others.
In red hens, in-ovo technology can see through the shell and detect the sex-specific color of the chick’s first feathers.
For white chickens, however, it does not work. Performs hormonal analysis but is considerably more expensive and slow.
Eggs sold in stores come from red hens, while eggs from white hens are used to make animal feed and other agricultural industry products.
In December, scientists at US-Israeli tech company Huminn said they had successfully created egg-laying hens that produce only female chicks.
The technology involves genetically modifying chickens so that male embryos cannot develop and hatch.
Last June, 18 European NGOs formed a coalition calling for an end to the killing of chickens and ducks, a practice permitted under EU law.
According to L214, the practice could still be banned before 2025 with a review of EU legislation on animal welfare.