The Daily Populous Tuesday July 18th, 2023 morning edition
Authored by reuters.com and submitted by cabeeza

REHOVOT, Israel, July 17 - Every year, egg farmers kill 7 billion day-old male chicks because they cannot grow up to lay eggs and are the wrong breed for meat. A laboratory in Israel has a solution: what if the male eggs don't hatch?

All the chicks are female at Yuval Cinnamon’s laboratory in central Israel, where new technology offers an answer to what he calls “the most devastating animal welfare issue worldwide - the culling and sorting of day-old male chicks”.

Day-old male chicks are normally "either macerated or suffocated or electrified. In some countries they do not even bother to cull their males properly,” explained Cinnamon, principal investigator at Israel’s Volcani Institute, which works to attain food security and food safety.

Cinnamon said that his team has generated a sex-linked genetic trait that stops the development of male embryos shortly after eggs are laid.

[1/5]Female chicks perch on a countertop in a laboratory at the faculty of agriculture at the animal science institute of the Volcani Institute in Rehovot, Israel, July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

“We take these eggs and activate the genetic trait using blue-light illumination which immediately causes the males to stop developing. The females don’t carry the trait and are entirely non-genetically modified, as are the table eggs they lay,” explained Cinnamon.

The unhatched male eggs can be used for other purposes such as animal feed.

Yaarit Wainberg, CEO of Poultry by Huminn, which is licensed to commercialize the research, wants to bring the technology to hatcheries worldwide.

“We are in advanced talks with layer genetics companies and can see our solution on the market within two years. It will solve a major problem for the industry.”

Reporting and writing by Hannah Confino; Editing by Ari Rabinovitch

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Rum____Ham on July 18th, 2023 at 00:55 UTC »

They cull the females, too.

Source: I worked at an egg farm in high school. It's a horrible, horrible place, where this is untold suffering of innocent creatures. If you can afford to buy more humanely produced eggs, you should do so.

mauromauromauro on July 17th, 2023 at 23:05 UTC »

Uplifting.. yes... Very uplifting

sxespanky on July 17th, 2023 at 20:38 UTC »

Saved you a click bit:

"Cinnamon said that his team has generated a sex-linked genetic trait that stops the development of male embryos shortly after eggs are laid.

“We take these eggs and activate the genetic trait using blue-light illumination which immediately causes the males to stop developing. The females don’t carry the trait and are entirely non-genetically modified, as are the table eggs they lay,” explained Cinnamon.

The unhatched male eggs can be used for other purposes such as animal feed."