Because the male chicks of egg-laying breeder hens are unable to lay eggs and are not bred to produce excessive flesh for the meat industry, they are killed. These young birds are ground up alive or tossed into bags to suffocate.
The following footage from an undercover investigation by Mercy for Animals shows workers at an Iowa hatchery killing 150,000 newborn male chicks every single day.
Chicks born at hatcheries are sent off to slaughter the very day they take their first breath. The only lives these babies know is one in which they are sorted and handled like pieces of garbage. Workers grab them by their wings, toss them onto conveyor belts, and throw them down a chute to spend their final moments in a grinding machine—in which they are ground up while they are still alive.
All this is standard procedure, widely accepted at commercial hatcheries and within the bounds of animal welfare laws. The egg industry considers male chicks to be useless because they don’t lay eggs and can’t be raised profitably for meat. Their sisters are not exactly lucky to remain alive.
For anyone who thinks that eating eggs doesn’t kill animals, millions of male chicks each year are born in hatcheries and promptly thrown into the blades of giant garbage disposals.
