By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every year, six billion newborn chicks are killed at egg-laying facilities around the world. Usually, they’re either gassed or shredded to death en masse. These aren’t accidental killings, but rather, an established practice in the egg industry known as “chick culling.” Despite a nonbinding pledge to end the practice by 2020, U.S. egg producers still cull, or kill, 300 million chicks a year as a standard operating procedure.

So, why is chick culling still a thing, and when — if ever — will it end?

What Is Chick Culling, and Why Does It Happen?

When a chicken egg hatches, there’s a roughly 50 percent chance that the chick inside will be male. In the meat industry, this is no problem, because male and female chickens can both be raised as “broilers,” or chickens slaughtered for meat. But in the egg industry, male chicks are a problem.

Up until the early 20th century, U.S. farmers used “dual purpose” chicken breeds for both egg-laying and meat. This changed around the 1920s, when farmers began selectively breeding chickens for one purpose or another. Now, 100 years later, the hens at egg-laying facilities have been bred to pump out as many eggs as possible in their lifetimes, while the chickens at meat facilities have been bred to grow fat as quickly as possible.

Thanks to selective breeding, male chicks that are born at egg-laying facilities will not grow to be especially fat, and the quality of their meat will be poor. But as living creatures, they still require food, water and resources to survive, and all of those things cost farmers money — more money than they’d get from selling the chickens for meat.

The financial calculus, though macabre, is clear: it’s cheaper to kill male chicks after birth than to raise them as broilers. And that’s exactly what farmers at egg-laying facilities do.

In the U.S. and Canada, the most common method of chick-culling is maceration — that is, grinding the chicks to death en masse. Chicks are also culled via gassing, suffocation and electrocution.

What Alternatives Are There To Chick Culling?

In 2016, the industry trade group United Egg Producers (UEP) issued a non-binding pledge to phase out chick culling by 2020. That obviously hasn’t happened, but the group says it remains committed to doing so in the future. If and when the industry does finally move away from chick culling, what might that look like?

In-ovo Sexing

Right now, the most popular and viable alternative to chick culling is something called in-ovo sexing. This is the practice of determining the sex of a chicken embryo before the egg hatches, so that eggs with male chicken embryos can be used as animal feed before they’re hatched.

While this technology is still in its infancy, it’s become increasingly popular among European egg producers, in part because several European countries have banned chick culling. Although it has yet to be introduced to the U.S. egg market, at least two companies have committed to using in ovo sexing, one by October of this year.

There are a lot of different in-ovo sexing technologies — around 11 of them, according to a recent review of scientific literature and patents. Some involve drilling a small hole in a newly-laid egg, extracting and testing a fluid sample, and then sealing the hole with beeswax or another substance; other in-ovo sexing technologies are non-invasive, and only require the egg to be optically scanned to determine the sex of the embryo.

Genetic Engineering

Another potential solution to chick culling is gene editing. In recent years, there have been several efforts to create a genetically modified breed of chicken that only lays eggs with female embryos, which would theoretically solve the problem of chick culling entirely. The Israeli company Huminn claims to have accomplished something very close to this.

Huminn’s “Golda hens,” as it refers to them, lay eggs that react differently to blue light depending on the gender of the embryo. If it’s a female, the egg develops normally, but if it’s a male embryo, the blue light halts its development entirely. As such, no male chicks are born, or culled, from Golda hens.

Farming Just One Breed of Chicken

Lastly, there’s a decidedly old-school solution to the problem of chick culling, which is to stop using different breeds of chicken for meat and egg-laying.

For most of agricultural history, this was the norm. Male chickens were eaten, and female chickens were kept around to lay eggs (and then eaten). But over the course of the 20th century, producers selectively bred chickens at an aggressive rate in order to maximize both egg and meat production. As a result, some chicken breeds now lay an unnatural amount of eggs, while others grow to be unnaturally large; the former are used as layers, while the latter are used for meat.

While this specialized breeding is more efficient and profitable for egg producers, it’s also the reason chick culling exists. If farms reverted back to the historical standard, and used dual-purpose chickens like the Rhode Island Red for both eggs and meat, chick culling would be a thing of the past.

Why Aren’t Egg Producers Using These Technologies Already?

Some are. Sort of. In Europe, many egg producers have embraced in-ovo sexing. The largest hatchery in Europe began using in-ovo technology in 2021, and a September 2023 analysis found that 15 percent of egg-laying hens in the European Union were sexed in-ovo. The technology has been implemented in several more European countries since then.

In the U.S, however, in-ovo sexing technology isn’t yet being used. Why?

No Legal Prohibitions Against Chick Culling in the U.S.

As of this writing, chick culling is banned in Austria, France, Germany and Luxembourg. Italy has banned the practice as well, though it doesn’t take effect until the end of 2026, and Switzerland has banned the grinding, but not the gassing, of male chicks.

In the U.S., by contrast, chick culling is fully legal. While there are technological and financial challenges to adopting in-ovo sexing, the lack of any legal pressure to do so is undoubtedly a huge reason for its lack of progress as well.

Problems Scaling

In 2021, United Egg Producers said in a press release that, while it’s still committed to phasing out chick culling, the technology used in Europe isn’t ready to be launched in the U.S., as it doesn’t satisfy: “food safety, ethical standards and a scalable solution.”

Respeggt is one of the companies that has developed in-ovo sexing technology, and its system has been in use at the largest hatchery in Norway for the last year. Over the course of that year, the company’s technology sexed about 20 million eggs in Norway and German. That’s a relatively small fraction of the approximately 600 million eggs that need to be sexed every year in the United States in order to keep up with current rates of egg consumption.

Other Issues With In-Ovo Technology

In addition to scaling issues, in-ovo technology also faces a question of timing. The goal of ending male chick culling — at least, from an animal welfare perspective — is to prevent the pain and suffering chicks feel when they’re killed. In order to do this, however, egg producers need to be able to identify the sex of an embryo before that embryo is capable of feeling pain.

This is where things get tricky, because there’s no consensus yet on the question of when exactly a chicken embryo can feel pain. Some studies put the number at seven days after hatching, while others suggest that it’s closer to 13 days.

That discrepancy matters a lot. If the 13-day estimate is correct, Respeggt’s in-ovo tech is potentially a great way to reduce pain, as it can detect the sex of a chick between eight and 11 days after it’s hatched. But if the seven-day estimate is the accurate one, Respeggt’s technology won’t be able to save any chicken embryos from feeling pain.

That said, since many male chicks are ground up alive, it’s probably still a less painful death than they’d experience if they were born and culled.

Efficiency and Profits

As mentioned earlier, switching to dual-purpose chicken breeds would eliminate the perceived necessity of chick culling. But it would also result in fewer eggs and less chicken meat being produced, as dual-purpose breeds are less efficient than specialized ones. Supply would go down, but without any corresponding drop in demand, poultry prices would increase significantly.

At its current state, in-ovo sexing would also result in pricier eggs, though probably only by a couple of pennies.

Will the U.S. Ever Stop Culling Male Chicks?

Despite the slow progress, there’s still hope that U.S. egg producers will eventually follow Europe’s lead and phase out chick culling.

John Brunnquell is the founder and president of Egg Innovations, a company that sells free-range and pasture-raised chicken eggs. In March, Brunnquell told the New York Times that the main hatchery he uses is set to start using in-ovo sexing technology in early 2025, and will hopefully be selling cull-free eggs later that summer.

It’s unclear which form of in-ovo sexing technology that hatchery will be using, and Brunnquell declined to identify the hatchery, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

In May of this year, the Dutch egg producer Kipster announced a commitment to use in-ovo sexing in its Indiana egg operation by October.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the reason most of the egg industry still cull chicks is because it’s legal and more profitable than the alternatives. Animal rights activists have called for a ban on chick culling in the U.S. to no avail. Some animal protection groups, including The Humane League, have been working to persuade brands like Kipster to adopt alternative methods.

The key to getting the rest of the U.S. egg industry on board is to ensure methods like in-ovo sexing are just as profitable as the alternative. Thankfully, there are signs that this is happening. The price of sexing chicks in-ovo has dropped steadily over the last five years, and if cull-free eggs are able to achieve price parity with the competition, male chicks may soon be spared the fate that so many of them face every day.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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Advocates said a lack of animal welfare laws is leading to pain and suffering on American factory farms.

Close to 99% of livestock is now raised in industrial-type facilities, where animal welfare groups said efficiency and profitability take precedence over animals' well-being.

Delcianna Winders, associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said while more than a dozen states have banned what are deemed torture-like confinement for animals, there is no federal law protecting them from abuse.

"If most people were aware that the animal they're sitting down to eat couldn't move throughout their entire life, just to give one example, I don't think they would want to support that," Winders contended.

Winders pointed out the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals be knocked unconscious before they are killed but corporations running factory farms are lobbying for the law to be weakened in order to speed up meat production.

So-called "ag-gag" laws in several states criminally penalize those who seek to expose animal suffering on farms, in slaughterhouses and at animal auctions. Winders added she is concerned a second Trump Administration could allow factory farm owners to further erode any remaining health and safety standards.

"They've been able to carve themselves out from complying with the laws that everybody else has to comply with," Winders asserted. "That certainly includes cruelty-to-animals laws. It also includes pollution laws, worker-safety laws, the whole gamut."

Winders advised people concerned with animal welfare to try more plant-based alternatives to meat and learn more about how their food is raised. She stressed as consumers increasingly turn to "organic" and "free-range" meat options, corporations are working to lower the standards for what those labels mean and the conditions under which those animals can be raised.

This story is based on original reporting by Seth Millstein for Sentient.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Every year, humans around the world eat 360 million metric tons of meat. That’s a lot of animals — or more precisely, a lot of dead animals. At any given point, there are 23 billion animals in factory farms, and countless more being farmed or caught in the sea. As a result, the number of animals killed for food every day is almost too large of a number to comprehend.

Animal Agriculture, by the Numbers

Before getting into the death toll, it’s worth remembering that animals suffer immensely in factory farms, and on the way to slaughterhouses, and in slaughterhouses. Around 99 percent of livestock are raised in factory farms, and factory farms prioritize efficiency and profitability over animal welfare. There are few laws protecting livestock from abuse and mistreatment on farms, and violators of those laws are rarely prosecuted.

The result is a significant amount of pain and misery for farmed animals, and that suffering is an important thing to keep in mind as we dive into the numbers behind these animals’ deaths.

How Many Animals Are Killed for Food Every Day?

Quantifying animal slaughter is relatively straightforward — except when it comes to fish and other aquatic life. There are two reasons for this.

First, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which tracks global livestock statistics, measures fish production in weight, not number of animals. Second, the FAO’s numbers only include farmed fish, not those caught in the wild.

To overcome the first challenge, researchers attempt to convert the total pounds of fish caught into the total number of fish themselves. Obviously, this is an inexact science that requires quite a bit of guesswork, and as such, estimates of fish slaughter tend to vary significantly, and are generally expressed in relatively wide ranges.

As for the second challenge, researchers Alison Mood and Phil Brooke have attempted to quantify the number of wild fish caught every year, first by pulling data from multiple sources and then by converting the total weight of wild fish to an estimated number of animals.

The following numbers are based on 2022 data from the FAO, except for the fish tallies: for farmed fish, the low end of the range draws on research by the Sentience Institute, while the high end is based on an analysis by Mood and Brooke. For wild-caught fish, the low end and high ends of the estimate are both based on a range provided by Mood and Brooke.

With that being said, here are the best estimates of how many animals are killed every day on a per-species basis.

• Chickens: 206 million/day


• Farmed Fish: Between 211 million and 339 million


• Wild Fish: Between 3 billion and 6 billion


• Ducks: 9 million


• Pigs: 4 million


• Geese: 2 million


• Sheep: 1.7 million


• Rabbits: 1.5 million


• Turkeys: 1.4 million


• Goats: 1.4 million


• Cows: 846,000


• Pigeons & other birds: 134,000


• Buffalo: 77,000


• Horses: 13,000


• Other animals: 13,000

In total, this means that every 24 hours, between 3.4 and 6.5 billion animals are killed for food. That comes to a lower-end estimate of 1.2 trillion animals killed every year. That’s a positively staggering number. For contrast, anthropologists estimate that the total number of human beings who’ve ever existed is just 117 billion.


A couple of things stand out about this data.


For one, if we exclude fish, the overwhelming majority of animals slaughtered for food are chickens. This isn’t a surprise, given that poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg — an increase of almost 600 percent.


The consumption of other meats didn’t rise nearly as much over that period. There was a modest increase in per-capita pork consumption, from 7.97 kg to 13.89 kg; for every other meat, consumption has remained relatively stagnant over the last 60 years.


Also notable is the relatively high death tolls of animals that many Americans might not think of as meat sources for humans. Slaughtering horses for meat is illegal in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop people around the world from killing 13,000 of them every day. Rabbit meat isn’t a common dish in America, but it’s wildly popular in China and the European Union.


Animals Slaughtered Who Are Never Eaten


One thing that’s particularly frustrating about all of this, from both an efficiency standpoint and an animal welfare standpoint, is that a sizable share of the animals killed for food are never even eaten.


A 2023 study published in Sustainable Production and Consumption found that 24 percent of livestock animals die prematurely at some point in the supply chain: they either die on the farm before they’re slaughtered, die in transit on their way to the slaughterhouse, die at a slaughterhouse but aren’t processed for food, or are thrown away by grocers, restaurants and consumers.


This wasted food adds up to about 18 billion animals a year. The meat from these animals never reaches the lips of any human, making their deaths — which, it should be stressed, are often excruciatingly painful and bloody — essentially pointless. What’s more, this tally doesn’t even include seafood; if it did, the amount of wasted meat would be many orders of magnitude higher.


In the U.S., around a quarter of animals in this category die on the farm from disease, injury or other causes. Another seven percent die in transit, and 13 percent are thrown away by grocers after being processed into meat.


Some of these “wasted deaths” are part and parcel of factory farm operations. Every year, around six billion male chicks are intentionally killed, or “culled,” on factory farms due to the fact that they can’t lay eggs. In the seafood industry, billions of aquatic animals are caught by accident every year — a phenomenon called bycatch — and are either killed or injured as a result.


It’s worth noting that these numbers vary significantly from country to country. The global average for wasted meat is around 2.4 animals per person per year, but in the U.S., it’s 7.1 animals per person — almost three times higher. On the other end of the spectrum is India, where only 0.4 animals per person are wasted every year.


The Hidden Death Tolls of the Environmental Destruction of the Meat Industry


The above death tolls only count animals who are farmed or caught with the goal of being eaten by humans. But the meat industry claims many other animal lives in more indirect ways.


For instance, cattle farming is the number one driver of deforestation around the world, and deforestation inadvertently kills a whole lot of animals that were never intended to be food in the first place. In the Amazon alone, 2,300 animals are at risk of extinction due to deforestation, as the clearing of trees wipes out their natural habitats and deprives them of the resources they need to survive. 


Another example is water pollution. The manure from livestock farms often leaks into nearby waterways, and this can have a ripple effect that results in many more animal deaths: Manure contains phosphorus and nitrogen, both of which promote the growth of algae; this eventually leads to harmful algal blooms, which deplete the oxygen in the water and clog the gills of fish, killing them.


All of this is a long way of saying that killing one animal for food often results in many other animals dying.


The Bottom Line


The astonishing number of animals killed for food every day, both directly and indirectly, is a sobering reminder of the impact our appetite for meat has on the world around us. From the animals slaughtered on farms to the creatures killed by agriculture-driven deforestation and farm pollution, the death toll that a meat-based diet demands is much higher and more far-reaching than many people realize.




Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the largest health threats to humanity, according to the World Health Organization. It's been over 40 years since the discovery of a new antibiotic class; an ominous gap in modern medicine given the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The spread and severity of antibiotic resistance is exacerbated by antibiotic overuse and lax prescribing standards, but also by animal agriculture. Depending on the country, roughly 70 percent of all antibiotics produced are used in agriculture to prevent disease, or enhance animal growth. This overuse not only fosters the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals, but in humans who consume that meat.

At a critical meeting last month, the United Nations made a global pledge to reduce deaths from antibiotic resistance, which includes clamping down on antibiotic use in animal farming. Sentient's recent investigation in collaboration with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Cargill routinely uses critically important antibiotics in livestock, despite rules from the FDA and warnings from the WHO.

It's clear that farmers need to reduce their dependence on antibiotics. But a complete ban would be a naive solution, says Jennifer Ronholm, Canada's research chair in agricultural microbiology and professor at McGill University. Ronholm argues a ban could result in food shortages and an uptick in livestock diseases. That's why her lab aims to uncover whether they can design and optimize animal microbiomes to lessen the need for antibiotic use in agriculture.

How Farming Practices Lead to Antibiotic Resistance

A lot of the pathogens we're seeing with high drug resistance originate from animals. Since the 1940s, roughly 50 percent of zoonotic diseases have been traced back to agriculture. "They're circulating in agriculture environments, picking up the [antibiotic resistance] genes and then circulating back to humans. So, figuring out a way to cut that zoonotic transfer feels like a really effective way to deal with the problem," Ronholm tells Sentient.

To prevent the emergence of zoonotic diseases, a 2022 paper called for reducing meat consumption to alleviate animal confinement on farms, and also to avoid clearing more land for agriculture. The paper's author, Matthew Hayek, described animal agriculture as a "trap of rising infectious diseases," and urged that escaping this trap means "limiting meat consumption."

Poor conditions on farms - such as cramped facilities and poor ventilation - can exacerbate the spread of antibiotic resistance. Recent estimates found 1.7 billion animals in the U.S. live on factory farms, up nearly 50 percent since 20 years ago, in response to growing demand for animal products. Further, factory farms produce twice as much sewage as the country's population. These confined conditions can create physical and mental stress for the animals, which may lead to weakened immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection. This, in tandem with the farm's high amounts of waste, creates an optimal environment for disease spread.

A study looking at the effects of various pig farming conditions found lower levels of antibiotic resistance in organic and alternative farms than in conventional farms. The authors suggest the lower levels were from tighter regulation of antibiotic use, straw bedding and open ventilation.

Optimizing Animal Microbiomes to Prevent Disease

The premise of Ronholm's research ties into a key microbial concept of competitive exclusion, or simply, that particular healthy gut bacteria will outcompete harmful bacteria. By maintaining a balanced microbiome, this competition can prevent infection and disease from taking place.

At a recent presentation for World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress Week, Ronholm explained how her lab isolates these bacteria that competitively exclude infectious bacteria from healthy animals. The goal is then to create a tailored probiotic solution that optimizes animal's microbiome to lessen reliance on antibiotics for treatment.

Ronholm is particularly interested in mastitis infection, which is the most common disease in dairy cattle. Cows can get mastitis when bacteria infect their udder from the process of milking, dirty milking equipment or from their environment. Mastitis infection causes udder pain, swelling, and may leave the cow disorientated and feeble. The probiotic, when developed, could be applied to the cow's udder daily after milking. This probiotic could then strengthen their udder microbiome to fend off infection.

In a 2022 study, her team looked at Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria known for causing mastitis, and identified microbial differences in the cows who were susceptible to infection or not. The results showed three bacteria, most notably Aerococcus urinaeequi, as being protective against infection. In a further study published last month, the researchers also looked at mastitis caused by Escherichia coli infection and found that A. urinaeequi again prevented microbial colonization. Both papers were funded, in part, by a Canadian initiative called The Mastitis Network that aims to prevent mastitis and reduce antibiotic use on farms.

Erika Ganda, an assistant professor of food animal microbiomes at Penn State University, attended Ronholm's presentation and says the prospects of her research are "fantastic." Ganda's lab researches animal microbiomes to tackle antimicrobial resistance, while also bolstering health and food production.

For example, although antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock and poultry were banned in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration, probiotics can act as a growth promotion alternative. Disease prevention and growth promotion aren't mutually exclusive, Ganda says. "It costs energy to fight disease, so if that energy doesn't go into the immune system but goes instead into making milk or putting on muscle mass, that is a way of growth promotion." In Ganda's 2024 paper, probiotic supplementation improved growth in broiler chickens compared to other natural sources like essential oils. However, it's important to note that various fast growth methods in chickens come with animal welfare concerns.

From Research Lab to Farm Use

While Ronholm's team has yet to put one of these synthetic microbiomes in an animal, they are hopeful to get to this stage soon. "We have one product that we tried in a pre-clinical trial this year that worked well. I think in less than 10 years these types of products will be on the market," Ronholm says, but notes that her lab is purely focused on the research, not the business end of things.

An important next step is to understand the exact mechanisms of these gut bacterial battles that prevent infection."It's possible that they won't be as effective as antibiotics and people will not want to switch. But I don't foresee large limitations, efficacy issues or scaling factors," Ronholm says.

Research suggests that probiotics, among other gut-enhancing products, may also ward off avian flu - a serious disease that affects both animals and humans. Probiotics appear to clear harmful microbes and repair inflammatory damage in later stages of the infection. However, an exact probiotic cocktail to protect against avian flu in all of its infectious stages requires further work, the researchers concluded.

Managing this issue of antibiotic resistance on farms, at its core, boils down to proper management practices and vaccination strategies on farms, Ganda says. "The cleaner [and] the healthier animals are, the less antibiotics we're going to need, the less antimicrobial resistance you're going to find," she says. For now, researchers like Ronholm and Ganda endeavor to create tailored and effective solutions that can be added into farm systems easily to protect animals from infection and mitigate the larger issue of antibiotic resistance. Other researchers are looking into viruses that kill harmful bacteria in animals and selective breeding to produce animals that are more resistant to infection.

However, the onus is ultimately on the industry to address their role in this growing global public health challenge, which is predicted to kill 10 million people annually by 2050. Whether new strategies such as targeted probiotics are incorporated on a large scale into farming practices is also up to the agricultural industry. Antibiotic resistance is becoming increasingly widespread in both humans and animals, and the cramped and unsanitary conditions on factory farms are clearly a systemic root of the problem.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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