For many people, eggs are an everyday staple — something that rarely invites a second thought. But behind this habit is a reality that most consumers haven’t heard about.
Every year in the United States, the egg industry kills about 350 million male chicks. The reason is simple and unsettling. Modern chickens have been selectively bred for two entirely different purposes. Some are designed to grow quickly to produce large amounts of meat. Others are bred to lay as many eggs as possible.
Male chicks born into the egg industry don’t fit either category. They don’t lay eggs, and they don’t grow fast enough to be profitable for meat production. From an industry perspective, they are considered economically useless.
So what happens to them?
Shortly after hatching, they are “culled.” This is the industry term for killing animals deemed unprofitable. The most common method for killing male chicks in the egg industry is maceration, or dropping the chicks into a high-speed grinder. Chickens are excluded from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, and maceration is considered the most “humane” method by the industry.
What’s striking is how few people know about this practice. In one US consumer study, only 11% of respondents knew about male chick culling. Nearly half believed that those chicks are raised for meat instead.
The same study found strong interest in alternatives once consumers were aware of it. One alternative is in ovo sexing, which involves determining the sex of chicks before they hatch. This way, it is possible to detect male from female eggs and prevent the grinding up of male chicks before they are born. The female chicks still hatch and are raised for egg laying.
But this solution raises its own ethical questions. Scientists still don’t fully agree on when a developing embryo can perceive pain. If that threshold is earlier than assumed, then in ovo sexing may simply shift the timing of suffering rather than eliminate it.
And even if the fate of male chicks is addressed, the lives of female chickens remain unchanged.
Egg-laying hens are selectively bred to produce far more eggs than their bodies were ever meant to handle. This intense level of production puts stress on their skeletal and cardiovascular systems. With the rise of factory farming, the battery cage became the most common confinement system for laying hens in the US. Typically, about 5-9 hens are housed together in a small wire enclosure.
These cages are so cramped and barren that chickens cannot perform many of their most basic natural behaviors. In the wild, they would spend much of their day scratching and pecking at the ground, foraging for food. On a wire floor, there is nothing to peck at.
Under these conditions, stress builds quickly. They therefore peck out each other’s feathers, a behavior called “feather pecking.” To prevent this damage, the birds often have the top third of their beaks seared off.
Because hens are producing eggs at such high rates, their bodies are constantly drawing calcium from their bones. Combined with a lack of movement, this leads to widespread osteoporosis. Fragile bones break easily. One study found that up to 30% of battery hens suffered broken bones when they were removed from their cages to be transported and 35% of all mortalities of caged hens were due to cage layer osteoporosis.
When we step back and look at the full picture, it becomes clear that the issue goes far beyond a single practice like chick culling. It’s a system built around maximizing output at the expense of the animals within it.
For those concerned about animal welfare, the most consistent way to avoid contributing to this system is also the simplest: choosing not to consume eggs at all.