Male chicks

CorvusCorax

CorvusCorax

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Just posting this to ask...did you know what happened to male chicks?

I ask because one of my dad's jobs when I was growing up was to 'sex' chickens at the hatchery, females went in a red basket, males in a blue one, and even when I was five years old, I knew the male chicks were going to die, it was never a big secret.

Is this news to anyone? What do you think?
 
I've always known they get killed, like male dairy calves etc. And more or less knew it was going to be as quick and cheap as possible, never seen photos though...
 
It's nothing new to me. The dead chicks go into pet food, are sold to zoos, pets stores, etc as food for birds of prey and reptiles.

I guess some (albeit a very few) are saved by rescue organisations.

Poor little things!!
 
Hope they are accurate with the sexing... wouldn't it be a bugger if you were female and ended up on the conveyer belt:confused:

Sorry to jest, but sadly its life. We're farmer's and for a while there we shot all our dairy male calves within hours of birth because we could get nothing for them:( I hate it, but its life. Now we sell them on, we get £15 per calf:confused: but at least they get some life.
 
I used to be a falconer in a mild way - the males are gassed with CO2 arent they? I used to feed them to my kestrel.... I was an unusual teenager....:o
 
I have to ask, was your dad's official title 'chicken sexer'? :eek:

Unpleasant but yes, I knew it happened, have fed day-old chicks to various creatures over the years.
 
there was some footage of the chick converyor belts in a documentary a few years back where it stated the males were killed.

i knew all about it before though as i am in the poultry hobby and you find out all sorts of facts about what goes on here and there.

I have hatched chicks and unless they are an excellent example of the breed and someone happens to be looking for that breed that all my excess boys go for rearing on for meat. I dont mind as i know they have a good life and then are humanely dispatched.

Having said that i have been a softey this year. I had a chick hatch with a wry beak, most people would have necked it straight away but it seemed alert and healthy so i let it grow on. All the other boys from that hatch have since gone to my 'contact' but 'Beaky' remains here. He's a healthy, lively cockerel who happends to have a bottom beak at 90degrees to the top!! :D
 
Most day old male chicks end up as food for other animals.
I used to buy them in bulk to feed to our hawk, and there are some snakes that prefer chicks to anything else.
If they were not utilised in any way, that would be a needless waste, but they do fill a gap in the market.
 
Not good to be a male if they are meant for laying,but are`nt the male broilers kept rather than the hens? Anyway..a story..it was Christmas eve,and we had a dog food delivery from Berriewoods. One item was a box of chicken wings ,bit short that night and it being snowy the box had not been frozen down..so went to use that one. opened it up...oh dear ,a mis-order ,it was full of cute little yellow chicks.
Now although we feed "natural" I thought that was going a bit far!!:eek:
 
This reminds me of an email a friend forwarded from a luxury dining club in Manhattan. They wanted to make authentic coq au vin, but of course most "coqs" are swished at birth, so they had to search for weeks to find someone willing to sell them coqs. The resulting coq au vin cost an absolute fortune, which probably would have made generations of thrifty, French coq-au-vin cooking housewives laugh themselves silly...
 
I assume that everyone knows that millions of male chicks die every year as a by product of the egg industry, as everyone knows that they can't lay eggs! However I'm sure it's true that most people don't know how they die, as most people don't even know how the animal that provided the meat on their table died. We seem to have completely divorced meat and animals in this country.
In the case of battery chickens, the boys are probably much better off than the girls! Maybe one day, science will allow us to only hatch/breed the sex of farm animal that we require, saving a lot of wastage. Failing that, we could pay a little more money for our meat and eggs and go back to traditional utility breeds suitable for both egg laying and meat rearing.
Oh, and it seems a bit silly of Viva to describe the male chicks faced with imminent doom as 'uncomprehending' like it's a bad thing!
 
Please correct me as someone might have been pulling my leg but I was told that the Chinese have an art of sexing the eggs... They can tell by looking at the eggs if the foetus is a male or female. I don't know if this is true. A friend of mine who has rare breeds for beef gets a few male Fresian calves in and he sends them for beef too. I am not sure if we eat them or they go for pet food but I prefer the fact they've had some time in a grassy paddock before being destroyed. I live on a farm and we are about to slaughter 3 of our male sheep for the freezer. I'll be sad to see them go but they've had a lovely and very spoilt life. LindseyH I completely agree with you - it's a topic that's very close to my heart and the education needs to start in schools. My Mother does a Nativety with the donkeys, alpacas and sheep every Christmas and the reason why she continues is she's amazed at the children who do not know what a donkey or a sheep is. Bear in mind our local town is rural and is a market town. I find this very upsetting.
OK Just looked at the link and someone has told me porky pies. Why can't the male chicks enter the food chain for meat? I understand they won't fatten how a meat chicken will fatten but surely they'll be fine for pet food or similar? I find the waste thing very hard to comprehend. We farm and I understand the costings etc but it's so wasteful.
 
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Yes it's very sad in my opinion.. so are the conditions the females live in..
So I'v got 6 hens for my eggys so I know the chickens are all happy lil free range souls that lay them! :p
However over the time we have come across 3 loverly boys that we can't part with (the boys are normally sent to a friends farm to free range all day and be very noisy :p ) lucky was rescued from mr fox hence the name.. Alice was bought thinking he was a baby girl! And Bruno was bought because he's a cutie and we hope to hatch with him next year :p


Wow sorry for the ramble:D
 
Aces_High said:
Please correct me as someone might have been pulling my leg but I was told that the Chinese have an art of sexing the eggs... They can tell by looking at the eggs if the foetus is a male or female. .
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Some people swear that, with some breeds of poultry, the rounder eggs carry one gender of chick and the more pointy ones the other.

The chinese thing may be true, but you'd wonder what benefit that may have. Unless all male eggs go for eating and only the females are incubated. However the chinese also eat part-formed chicks and ducklings cooked in the shell, so it's difficult to see where they may be coming from with that one.

My seven year old son saw two surplus hens which I'd culled and hung in the outhouse. He asked what happened, so I explained that they were for us to eat. We discussed the differences between eating a bird which has been free and able to find lots of different things to eat, as ours had, and one which has been kept in a shed and fed the same thing every day. Having eaten supermarket chicken, he was interested in my suggestion that our chickens may taste better.

When we sat down to eat them, he asked if they were the ones he'd seen. I said they were, and we ate them. He declared they were better than any chicken he'd ever tasted, and now understands something about husbandry and eating our own produce.

He goes to a rural school, with mainly rural peers, where there is emphasis on rural matters. However, for too many children, there is definitely a lack of 'linkage' between everyday foods and their sources.
 
AengusOg said:
Some people swear that, with some breeds of poultry, the rounder eggs carry one gender of chick and the more pointy ones the other.

The chinese thing may be true, but you'd wonder what benefit that may have. Unless all male eggs go for eating and only the females are incubated. However the chinese also eat part-formed chicks and ducklings cooked in the shell, so it's difficult to see where they may be coming from with that one.

My seven year old son saw two surplus hens which I'd culled and hung in the outhouse. He asked what happened, so I explained that they were for us to eat. We discussed the differences between eating a bird which has been free and able to find lots of different things to eat, as ours had, and one which has been kept in a shed and fed the same thing every day. Having eaten supermarket chicken, he was interested in my suggestion that our chickens may taste better.

When we sat down to eat them, he asked if they were the ones he'd seen. I said they were, and we ate them. He declared they were better than any chicken he'd ever tasted, and now understands something about husbandry and eating our own produce.

He goes to a rural school, with mainly rural peers, where there is emphasis on rural matters. However, for too many children, there is definitely a lack of 'linkage' between everyday foods and their sources.
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Reading about your son and your chickens has made my day - how refreshing! I know I was generalising in my statement but I do feel it's so important that children know where their food comes from. We slaughtered some of our male chickens and took them to the game farm to be prepped and the guys in the sheds laughed at as - there was nothing on them to eat at all!!
On a different note - maybe my leg wasn't being pulled about the sexing of eggs. On the Chinese eaten the unborn chicks - my grandparents were in a very swish restaurant in Melbourne and a collegue ordered unborn lamb. I will eat and try anything but the description of that - no way and it's not even had a chance to spring around a field. Disgusting in my view. Sorry for the change of subject from male chicks.
 
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Quite sad as they are rather cute, however if they are humanely despatched, who cares? Chick, calf, cow, rat, horse - they all deserve humane destruction. What happens after that is trivial.
 
Kitsune said:
Quite sad as they are rather cute, however if they are humanely despatched, who cares? Chick, calf, cow, rat, horse - they all deserve humane destruction. What happens after that is trivial.
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I thought they looked rather cute too. Rich coming from me as I have a terrible phobia of birds and can't go into our hen paddock due to intense fear of them attacking me. I've been chased and attacked by Bantam cocks hence so scared!!

Totally agree on them being destroyed humanely and quickly - across the board it should be mandatory
 
It used to be that we bred for dual use,for instance a Jersey cow would go to an Aberdeen Angus to get a calf halfway useful for eating,Fresian/Holsteins werte dual purpose,and black and white bull calves fetched good money to grow on for beef.That was when beef animals grew on to two or three years old to finish.Nowadays,with BSE ,there is the 20 month rule,so late finishing steers are not viable.WE used also to breed dual purpose chooks,Rhode Island Reds/Light Sussex,but again breed hybrids developed for early finishing (meat) at SIX weeks,rather than six months,hybrid layers can do an egg EVERY day for up to nine months,then they are exhausted ,a mass clear out then means chicken soup day.

Because of the costs of feeding stock early finishing/egg production is now King.Pork ,again,early finishers..four and a half months old,it used to be six months or more..it then tasted better,but that seems to be a minor consideration,and the consumer won`t pay more for better meat,so the hybrid pig rules too.
Not a nice world for farm animals these days really,and to get meat reared the old more humane way really means rearing your own.
 
AengusOg said:
My seven year old son saw two surplus hens which I'd culled and hung in the outhouse. He asked what happened, so I explained that they were for us to eat. We discussed the differences between eating a bird which has been free and able to find lots of different things to eat, as ours had, and one which has been kept in a shed and fed the same thing every day. Having eaten supermarket chicken, he was interested in my suggestion that our chickens may taste better.

When we sat down to eat them, he asked if they were the ones he'd seen. I said they were, and we ate them. He declared they were better than any chicken he'd ever tasted, and now understands something about husbandry and eating our own produce.

He goes to a rural school, with mainly rural peers, where there is emphasis on rural matters. However, for too many children, there is definitely a lack of 'linkage' between everyday foods and their sources.
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How refreshing :) i so wish more people did this. I am trying to do the same with my son after having been shielded from the realities by my own mother which meant I didn't understand the importance of carefully sourced meat until just a few years ago.

EK - the rule on slaughtering cattle for human consumption was 30 months not 20 but has now been relaxed although it is still more expensive to slaughter a steer over 30 months because of additional precautions that are taken with the carcass. i do agree with the rest of what you say though.
 
Brownmare said:
How refreshing :) i so wish more people did this. I am trying to do the same with my son after having been shielded from the realities by my own mother which meant I didn't understand the importance of carefully sourced meat until just a few years ago.

EK - the rule on slaughtering cattle for human consumption was 30 months not 20 but has now been relaxed although it is still more expensive to slaughter a steer over 30 months because of additional precautions that are taken with the carcass. i do agree with the rest of what you say though.
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OOoops..sorry! Even thirty months is young though for some "slow" breeds. So if it is relaxed a bit ,can older stuff go through the markets now? Some blamed the splash on treatments for parasites..but those are still in use,so what did cause BSE I wonder..any ideas?
 
I knew that it was legal for chicks to go straight into a mincer, although I didn't think about which gender the chicks were.
 
i work in an inner city school where our catchment area of one of the most deprived areas in Britain.

I decided to run a 'hatch-it' club and bought my incubator etc in and set the eggs with the students (ages 11-16).

It took alot to get them to understand why these eggs were fertile and would hatch and how these differed from battery eggs.

Also what shocked me most was that when the chicks hatched we have a lovely variety of different colours and the kids asked 'what are the brown ones, are they chickens?'

It had never occured to me before that the students ideas of a chicken was a little yellow fluffy chick and then a white or brown hen. They couldnt get over the fact we had different coloured chicks and yes, they were still chickens!!

Furthermore i had to promise, very very faithfully, that none of these chicks would be eaten as we had several girls bawling their eyes out when a teacher joked he was going to eat them! Of course after a few week si bring them home and then the males do go off to 'the farm' but we dont tell the kids, lol!

I have run the club three times now and things the students say never cease to make me rethink how our next generation views where their food comes from.
 
the only cattle not allowed in food chain are those born before aug 1996 so very few of them around our oldest cow born before aug 1996 died a couple of months ago.
 
Paint Me Proud – what a good project. I've heard of schools where kids grow their own veg, but the only "animal raising" project I'd heard about was that poor headteacher with the lamb when the wishy-washy parents got up in arms about it being killed and demanded her resignation.

Re. uses for male chickens. Here in Germany you can buy skinny "soup chickens" in most supermarkets and butcher shops, as well as a bundle of carrot, leek, celeriac and parsley to chuck in the pot with it ("soup greens"). Maybe Jamie Oliver could add "making real chicken soup and stock" to his "to do" list. Or the anti-chick-squishers could hand out Rose Prince's first book, because it tells you how to buy a compassionately-farmed chicken or joint of meat each week and spin it into dozens of helpings in different meals at a couple of pence a serving.
 
EAST KENT said:
OOoops..sorry! Even thirty months is young though for some "slow" breeds. So if it is relaxed a bit ,can older stuff go through the markets now? Some blamed the splash on treatments for parasites..but those are still in use,so what did cause BSE I wonder..any ideas?
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We used to rear Herefords organically and although most were ready at 30 months there were some we kept to 36 months, and yes older stuff can go through the markets now.

I'm pretty sure the most likely cause of BSE was the feeding of animal waste back to (mainly dairy) cattle thus effectively making them into cannibals :(
 
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