A U.S. Department of Labor investigation this spring found the number of minors employed in livestock slaughterhouses nearly quadrupled between 2015 and 2022.

An animal rights group said the conditions in the plants are dangerous for workers and inhumane for the animals killed there. Iowa slaughters more pigs than any other state.

Sean Thomas, international director of investigations for the group Animal Equality, said there have been cutbacks in the number of inspectors at pork processing plants, where more than 1,000 hogs are slaughtered in an hour, meaning workers are at greater risk and the hogs face inhumane conditions.

"To think that even one inspector could verify the safety and the health of the product that was produced, and also the humane treatment of any animal entering a slaughterhouse, is kind of ridiculous," Thomas contended.

Livestock producers said they are constantly looking for more environmentally friendly ways to keep up with consumer demand. They offer as evidence federally funded programs they use to reduce the effects of large livestock operations.

Thomas argued increased consumer demand and the commercialization of livestock production means producers are moving the industry in the wrong direction.

"We're heading not towards a system that would improve the welfare of animals, but we are heading towards a system that will completely disregard it," Thomas asserted.

Processing facilities reportedly have an effect on their communities, too. A University of Michigan study found a correlation between domestic and sexual violence in places that are home to meatpacking facilities, a link which does not exist in manufacturing sectors not involved in killing animals.

This story is based on original reporting by Julieta Cardenas at Sentient.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

A growing number of consumers want to know that their meat, dairy and eggs come from animals who were treated well. The trend has become so widespread, in fact, that in the past decade, animal welfare labels have become a familiar sight on grocery store shelves. Now, a growing number of industry and animal welfare groups say fish welfare labels are the next frontier. The once-pervasive “happy cow” marketing campaign of the early-aughts may soon find a new life with the fish industry, as we enter the era of the “happy fish.” But just as with labels for meat and dairy, the promise does not always meet the reality. In other words, there’s no reason to believe the practice described as humane-washing won’t be a problem for fish too.

The Rise of ‘Sustainably Raised’ Fish

Americans are saying they want to eat a lot more fish these days, citing a mix of health and environmental concerns. Just as many consumers of meat are drawn to cuts marked “sustainable,” fish shoppers too are looking for an environmental seal of approval. So much so, in fact, that the “sustainable” seafood market is predicted to reach more than $26 million by 2030.

One popular sustainability certification program for wild caught fish is the blue check from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), one of the oldest fish certifications, used for an estimated 15 percent of the global wild fish catch. The blue check signals to consumers that the fish “comes from healthy and sustainable fish stocks,” according to the group, meaning that the fisheries considered the environmental impact and how well the fish populations were managed to avoid overfishing. So while restricting how many fish a company harvests doesn’t address how fish die, it at least avoids wiping out entire populations.

Yet the pledge does not always match the practice. According to a 2020 analysis, researchers found that MSC blue check marketing materials often misrepresent the typical environment of the fisheries it certifies. Even though the certifying group “disproportionately features photographs of small-scale fisheries,” most of the fish certified by MSC Blue Check are “overwhelmingly from industrial fisheries.” And while around half of the group’s promotional content “featured small-scale, low-impact fishing methods,” in reality, these types of fisheries represent a mere “7 percent of the products it certified.”

In reaction to the study, the Marine Stewardship Council “raised concerns” about the authors’ connection to a group that had criticized MSC in the past. The journal conducted a post-publication editorial review and found no errors in the study’s findings, though it did revise two characterizations of the council in the article and revise the competing interest statement.

Sentient reached out to the Marine Stewardship Council to ask about what, if any, animal welfare standards the blue check promises. In an email response, Jackie Marks, senior communications and public relations manager for MSC replied that the organization is “on a mission to end overfishing,” with a focus on environmentally sustainable fishing” and “ensuring that the health of all species and habitats are protected for the future.” But, she continues, “humane harvest and animal sentience sit outside the MSC’s remit.”

Another resource for conscious consumers is the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch Guide. The online tool shows consumers which species and from which regions to “responsibly” purchase, and which ones to avoid, covering wild fisheries and aquaculture operations alike. Here too, the emphasis is on environmental sustainability: “Seafood Watch’s recommendations address the environmental impacts of seafood production to help ensure that it is fished and farmed in ways that promote the long-term well-being of wildlife and the environment,” according to its website.

Yet in Seafood Watch’s extensive standards for aquaculture, and for fisheries, (all 89 and 129 pages, respectively), standards that “promote the long-term well-being of wildlife,” neither animal welfare nor humane treatment are mentioned. For now, most fish labels with claims about sustainability primarily cover environmental practices, but a new crop of labels that investigate fish welfare are on the horizon.

The Future of Fish Labels Includes Fish Welfare

Up until a few years ago, most consumers didn’t give much thought to fish, how they lived or whether they were capable of suffering. But a growing body of research has uncovered evidence of fish sentience, including that some fish recognize themselves in the mirror, and are quite capable of feeling pain.

As the public learns more about the inner lives of all sorts of animals, including fish, some consumers are willing to pay more for products that assure them the fish was treated well. Fish and seafood companies are taking notice of this, along with some labeling bodies, including the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, which has called animal welfare “a key factor in defining ‘responsible production.”

In 2022, ASC published its Fish Health and Welfare Criterion draft, where the group called for certain welfare considerations to be included, including “anesthesia of fish during handling operations that can inflict pain or injury if fish are moving,” and “maximum time fish can be out of water,” that “shall be signed off by a veterinarian.”

Much like most meat industry labels, the group leaves oversight mainly to farmers. ASC spokesperson Maria Filipa Castanheira tells Sentient that the group’s “work on Fish Health and Welfare consists of a set of indicators that allows farmers to continuously monitor and evaluate their farming systems and the status of fish species.” These are “real daily actions that take into account some key indicators defined as Operational Welfare Indicators (OWI): water quality, morphology, behavior and mortality,” she adds.

Heather Browning, PhD, a researcher and lecturer on animal welfare at the University of Southampton, raised concerns about the measures. Browning, telling industry publication The Fish Site that these measures mostly focus more on animal health than well-being.

Other measures that could address animal well-being specifically include preventing overcrowding — which is common and can lead to stress — and avoiding sensory deprivation caused by a lack of natural stimuli. Mishandling during capture or transport can also cause fish to suffer, and slaughter methods for farmed fish, also often considered by animal protection advocates to be inhumane, are overlooked by many labeling schemes.

Fish Welfare for Wild and Farmed Fish

In the U.S., “wild caught” labeled fish do tend to experience some welfare benefits as compared to farmed fish, at least during their lives.

According to Lekelia Jenkins, PhD, associate professor of sustainability at Arizona State University, who specializes in solutions for sustainable fisheries, these animals “grow up in their natural environments, are allowed to engage in the ecosystem and provide their ecological function in their natural environment.” This, she adds, “is a healthy thing for the environment and the fish up to the point of capture.” Compare this to many fish raised in industrial aquaculture operations, where overcrowding and living in tanks can cause stress and suffering.

That all takes a drastic turn for the worse, however, when fish are caught. According to a 2021 report by Eurogroup for Animals, fish can die in any number of painful ways, including “chased to exhaustion,” crushed or asphyxiated. Numerous other fish called bycatch are also caught up in nets and killed in the process, often in the same painful manner.

Is a Better Death for Fish Even Possible?

While regulating “humane slaughter” is notoriously difficult, a number of national welfare organizations are trying, including Australia’s RSPCA, Friends of the Sea, RSPCA Assured and Best Aquaculture Practices, by making stunning before slaughter mandatory. Advocacy group Compassion in World Farming created a table that lists the standards — and lack thereof — for a variety of fish labeling schemes, including whether the way the fish is slaughtered is humane and whether stunning prior to killing is mandatory.

CIWF tells Sentient that for the group “humane slaughter” is codified as “slaughter without suffering, which can take one of those three forms: death is instantaneous; stunning is instantaneous and death intervenes before consciousness returns; death is more gradual but is non-aversive.” It adds that “Instantaneous is interpreted by the EU as taking less than a second.”

Included on CIWF’s list is the Global Animal Partnership (GAP), which also requires stunning before slaughter, but unlike the others, also requires larger living conditions, minimized stocking densities and enrichment for farmed salmon. However, a representative from GAP tells Sentient that, for now, there are no GAP-certified salmon operations.

Still, there are other efforts, some more ambitious than others. One, the Ike Jime slaughtering method, aims to fully kill the fish in seconds, while the other, cell cultivated fish, requires no slaughter at all.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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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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A new study shows more than 1 million tons of animal waste is produced every year in the U.S.

Consumers' desire for more animal protein and better efficiency to reduce world hunger are a few of the reasons for the increase in concentrated animal feeding operations, and opponents said the emissions the large operations produce pose a risk to public health. Confined animal manure, waste, and urine fall onto slatted floors into a manure pit and are then piped into a pond or "manure lagoon."

Elise Pohl, a graduate student in global public health at the Queen Mary University of London, explained the disposal process.

"They take that manure and they pipe it into trucks to fertilize land," Pohl pointed out. "While it is sitting in that lagoon, it emits several different components: ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, endotoxins, carbon dioxide."

Pohl noted the facilities usually have no ventilation system, which permits particulate matter to float in the air amid feces and dust.

The Illinois Environmental Council said the state has 30,000 livestock operations, including an estimated 500 large concentrated animal feeding operations, one of the highest numbers of large-scale factory farms in the country. Large-scale ag producers said they are trying to meet consumer demand and are constantly looking for ways to be more environmentally friendly.

Research has shown employees exposed to manure pit gases have higher rates of respiratory illnesses. As many as 70% of exposed workers developed acute bronchitis due to a lack of occupational health and safety measures.

Pohl emphasized the health risks do not stop there.

"The front-line workers that are exposed to things like avian influenza and antimicrobial resistant genes, and they can take that home, expose their family and friends," Pohl outlined. "Then it's further spread into the community."

The study showed residents living near the large operations had higher rates of infant mortality and adults were diagnosed with more cases of tuberculosis, anemia, kidney disease and increased rates of hospital admissions than residents living in ZIP Codes with no large swine operations.


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