CHICKEN POLITICS. CHICKEN LOVE

There are chicken politics, and there is chicken love.  Like life, it’s a balancing act.

First the politics.

Nine billion chickens in the US and almost one billion in the UK are killed annually for food. Before they meet their maker and are slid onto Styrofoam shrink-wrapped supermarket trays, most chickens spend their lives in super-sized, crappy (literally) sheds where they are force fed and so closely cramped together that they often cannot stand.  The stress of poor nutrition and 24/7 confinement can lead them to peck each other to death.

I’m not sure if those US/UK figures include male chicks annually culled (a neutral-sounding word meaning "killed"), but in Germany, some 45 million male chicks are gassed or shredded each year on Day Two of Life as if they were just so many concentration camp victims who had exceeded their useful lives.  The purported economic reason for this planned extermination is that male chicks don’t lay eggs (surprise!) and they don’t have plump breasts or thighs.  It seems that "sex sells" rules not only the human house; it also rules the hen house.

In 2018, the German coalition government agreed to put an end to this animal cruelty.  The idea was stop the culling of chicks and instead culling their eggs in a “scientific” way.  Male chicks would be identified after the ninth day of incubation and the male eggs would be separated from the female eggs before they hatched.  You can read more about in-ovo sexing here: Wiki and the fate of the male eggs here: PoultryWorld.

There are various ways of sexing eggs; this is one example pioneered by Seleggt, a Dutch company.  Here's how it works according to the schematic above and Martijn Haarman, the managing director of Seleggt:

After 9 days of incubation a laser creates a tiny hole in the hatching egg. A little droplet of fluid will come out through this hole. The droplet is checked for the presence of female hormones. If no female hormones are present, it means that the egg holds a future male and our robot sorts it out. Only those hatching eggs in which a female develops, are going back into the incubator.

After sorting, the male eggs immediately flow into a tank. Tanks full of fluid [yikes!] male eggs including egg shells are stored in a cold store and periodically collected. A part [I guess that means the egg] of the traditionally culled layer males are used in zoos or for feeding birds of prey. Now that we stop culling males, it is very important that there is a good circular application for the male eggs that are sorted out.

So newly-hatched male chicks are no longer cruelly killed and wind up in zoo animal feed, cosmetics, and labs that develop vaccines.  Instead their eggs do.  I suppose that's progress, but the fact that the eggs are not sold in supermarkets or given to food banks seems like a terrible waste, given that eggs are an excellent source of protein and that there are millions of people around the world who would give their left arm for an egg.  But crying over deliberately dumped male eggs, like spilled milk, is not one of modern man’s virtues.

Even more of a crying shame is the way that politics entered the German chicken coop.  No sooner was the prospective ban on culling announced and the requirement of sexing introduced to be effective at the end of October 2019, than the German poultry industry began clucking and squawking that this was too burdensome and time consuming and, besides, it made their eggs noncompetitive with the Dutch and Polish eggs entering the country unchecked.   

Sympathetic government parties flocked to the call and worked with the home-grown industry to postpone the ban. Years flew by and here we are.  In September 2020, the German Minister of Agriculture proposed a new bill that kicks the chicken further down the road.  Culling of one-day-old male chicks would now be banned by the end of this year (two years delayed! two additional years of culling!) and in-ovo sexing of chick embryos would be required by the end of 2023.  That leaves two years of hatched male chicks.  Now what?

Before 2024, millions of male chicks will be hatched in Germany and will not (at least not legally) be culled.  What will happen to them?  I really have no idea.  I imagine a few will become pets--usually for a couple of weeks following Easter.  But the millions of remaining male chicks will probably be cooped up with their female brethren until they are sold for slaughter and ultimately find their way onto the dinner table. Fortunately, there are quite a few recipes for capons and roosters. Coq au vin, anyone?

So much for unpleasant chicken politics.  Let's balance that out with some delightful chicken love.

Some people are embracing chickens not just for their eggs, but also for their affection, as this touching video https://youtu.be/z7Jdl0Y87XA shows. 

And then there's the AirMail story of Sigrid, the hen with the safety vest pictured above, who lives in a small German village.  "Hen Party" is a sweet counterbalance to German chicken politics, and because the article requires a subscription, I’ll quote it in full:

Why did the chicken cross the road? To lay an egg. And why was it wearing a fluorescent vest? To protect it from the traffic, of course.

Sigrid [above] the hen delivers her own punch line every morning as she flutters over a stone wall, crosses a road and wanders up a hill in her German village to lay a breakfast egg for Hans-Dieter Neuber, 82. The vest was bought by the chicken’s owner to alert motorists as she journeys through her village near the town of Detmold.

“I’ve been getting an egg delivery service for the past two and a half months,” Mr. Neuber said. “We’re on first-name terms and she lets me stroke her.”

The service is not free of charge; Mr. Neuber pays her in food. “It’s a good deal,” he told The Times of London. “She delivers her egg, walks up to me, gets her feed and then she disappears and it all gets repeated the next day.”

Sigrid’s owner, who also keeps a turkey and two peacocks, did not know about her daily excursions until Mr. Neuber gave her a bottle of sparkling wine to thank her. The owner now straps a hi-vis jacket to Sigrid before the industrious bird goes to work in the morning.

Sigrid is fast becoming a media celebrity, with national TV crews descending on Detmold in recent weeks to film her deliveries. The idea of protecting poultry with luminous jackets isn’t new — a farmer in Hesse made headlines last October by putting one on her chicken Henrietta, who made a habit of roaming the streets.

Recently, Sigrid has been accompanied on her trips by the two peacocks she shares a field with. “But they don’t bring anything, they just scrounge,” Mr. Neuber said.

Impressive though they are, Sigrid’s 54-yard commutes pale in comparison with the widely-reported odyssey of Inge, another red hen that gained fame in 2018 by escaping certain death at the fast-food stall she had been sold to. She made it over a five-foot wall and embarked on a two-month journey back to her farm three miles away in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Inge braved foxes, traffic and the weather, possibly driven by love for the cockerel Horst, from whom she had been separated. When she arrived back home, the farmer spared her life in reward.

I'm not saying that a young child hugging a chicken or an old man feeding a hen balance out the cruelty of the poultry industry.  But it's a damn good start.

Be kind to your animals.  We’re all in this together.

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn