Prohibition on killing male chicks: what has become of the hatcheries?

Prohibition on killing male chicks: what has become of the hatcheries?

Willi the farmer*

Germany is the only EU country where the slaughter of male chicks has been prohibited by law, and has been since 1^is January 2022. Now, a year later, I spoke with Markus, operator of a small hatchery who had to deal with this situation. A very long, intense and emotional interview.

My grade : The elimination of male chicks has also been prohibited in France since January 1, 2023. In a communiquéthe Ministry of Agriculture had dared to use the word ” grind »…

Hello Markus, we already spoke a few months ago. Tell readers what you were doing back then.

We have here, in East Westphalia, a structure of poultry farms that is quite unique in Europe. We like to call the region between Gütersloh and Paderborn ” chicken coop from germany “. It is from here that the whole of Germany is supplied with all the poultry that hobby breeders want. Chickens of all colors, fattening poultry, water fowl, guinea fowl and quail. It is a multitude of companies, all different, but which all complement each other.

We were here 6 hatcheries that provided chicks to breeders. Parents on site. A beautiful biodiversity. A mixture of colors ranging from normal browns and whites, blacks, grays, dwarfs and greenfinches. I was one of those little hatcheries.

You also killed chicks back then. What happened to these animals? Did you get rid of it?

First of all, there was never any chick grinding. Neither at my house nor at any other hatchery in Germany. It has always been a lie, constructed by NGOs like PETA et NABU and repeated by the media until it got into people’s heads. The chicks were euthanized by carbon dioxide in a device specially designed for this purpose. This is the same principle used in slaughterhouses to stun animals. Except that at home, the concentration of carbon dioxide was higher. Unconsciousness thus occurred much more quickly, the machine monitored concentration and duration.

Watch the media reports. Almost without exception, the word “ grind and if not, we use some image from the 1960s where chicks are smothered in large vats. You have already seen this in reports on fertilization: there is always the photo of the slurry tanker with the deflector.

I had a large number of buyers for the killed chicks. Reception centers for birds of prey, falconers, in short, all breeders whose animals have day-old chicks on the menu. A client ran her home for injured wild birds on behalf of the NABU with my chicks.

You wrote to the political world, to Mrs. Ophelia Nick [Verts, Secrétaire d’État parlementaire]. She is a veterinarian. What was his reaction?

I explained in detail to Mrs. Dr. Nick what we do here. A wide variety of animals. Robust hens from which it is not necessary to extract the last egg. They just have to look good, so that people can have lots of colorful hens in their homes, for the sake of having animals. We small businesses are all family businesses that work from the heart. We have short circuits, everything his party wants so badly.

I have also explained in detail why none of the alternatives are usable for us. The team in his office confirmed to me in writing and by telephone that they recognize my/our situation and the importance of our work here. After 10 weeks, we received from Dr. Nick a standard response consisting of cut-and-paste passages. Our particular situation was not addressed at all. We did not talk about solutions. Basically, it was the same correspondence as before with the CDU [qui avait lancé l’initiative].

What would have been an alternative for you?

First of all, we would have liked to have been able to use gender recognition in the bud. The sorting of our exotic was extremely laborious and expensive work. An installation that relieves us of this work before hatching would have been a dream, and we could have gathered together some financial means for that. But there was absolutely no facility that we could have purchased for our needs. And it is still the case today.

In addition, all alternatives to chick slaughter are designed to reduce the costs of selling eggs in the supermarket, if the chick brings in a maximum of 1 euro. But if gender identification or rooster breeding costs $3 or $4, anyone with two years of elementary school math can figure out that it only works if someone pays for it. Of the chicks I’ve hatched here, no eggs have ever made it to the supermarket. The prohibition therefore only applies in cases where the customer requests it anyway.

In France, we have also thought of another solution. For every egg sold in the supermarket, money goes into a fund. For each chick that is not killed, the hatchery receives money from this fund. Even if the chick ends up in a completely different sector. We could thus have continued to exist.

You mentioned France. Other countries are always said to follow the ban on killing chicks. How is it going there?

Besides the fact that the hatchery is reimbursed for the costs incurred, there are still other differences. If an egg detection is carried out, a few percent of undetected roosters” pass always through the grid. If a hatchery hatches 20,000 hen chicks, there could easily be 1,000 roosters in the flock. In this case, they must be placed in a breeding of ” roosters brothers “. In France, they can be killed and marketed as feeder chicks. Similarly, the total ban currently only applies to high-yield breeding. For all exotic animals, an authorization is obtained in France if the males are used for animal feed.

In Austria, breeders, the world of animal protection and the world of politics have together reached the following solution: you cannot hand over a killed chick for disposal, but there must always be a judicious recovery. One simply moves away in sensible steps from mere killing. And above all, we do not take the last step before the first.

Other hatcheries, usually small ones, have suffered the same fate as you. What are you doing today ? What about your facilities? Are they stopped?

In Germany, only the Lohmann group had very large hatcheries. Just look at the numbers. In order for each inhabitant of the Federal Republic to receive their four eggs per week, at least 60 million chicks must hatch each year. In January 2022, we still boasted of being able to save the lives of 40 million chicks a year. In December, it is realized that there have only been 15 to 16 million female chicks hatched in one year. And Mrs Klöckner [ancienne ministre de l’agriculture, CDU] had nevertheless claimed that it had given the hatcheries alternatives to avoid migration to other countries. Apparently, these alternatives weren’t as good as she claimed. In addition to the group which has several sites, there are still 2 or 3 smaller ones in Germany in the conventional sector, plus 3 or 4 in the organic sector. But even the latter have not been working at full speed for a long time.

The five colleagues from home mentioned above have, like me, also stopped. Some have already dismantled their installations. For me, they are still in place. They were also in service for four weeks last fall. There were laying hen eggs that a colleague was not allowed to deliver at the border because of bird flu. But it was only a temporary emergency. Here too, the facilities will probably be dismantled in the near future. After all, technique does not improve by standing still.

Where do the chicks come from now?

For my clients, I now pick up chicks once a week in Holland and Belgium. Other former hatcheries here in East Westphalia receive their chicks from France, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. With 450 km away, I’m the one who covers the shortest distance.

How did you feel when you suddenly had an empty holding?

At first it is of course strange. Where the noise of motors and fans used to be heard, suddenly everything is silent. But you get used to pleasant things very quickly. We no longer have to be ready 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, because there is a technical problem somewhere. We are no longer on the road on Sunday morning to get hatching eggs and busy on Sunday evening placing the eggs in the facilities. And it’s the same for the other colleagues. We had all done this with heart and a lot of passion. But we didn’t want to do it anymore. So we let it go. In fact, we really are the last generation.

Some animal advocates believe that only the dual-purpose chicken is the right solution. You agree ?

Of course we can do that. But then you have to tell the whole truth. The normal conventional laying hen today lays 320 eggs per year, the dual-purpose hen 230. It is therefore necessary to raise a third more hens. So we don’t need 60 million chicks every year, but 80 million. And it has nothing to do with intensive farming. It doesn’t matter if one breeder has 60 million hens or 60 million breeders have one hen.

Adding to this is the fact that the males must be bred and fed for 17 weeks, instead of 6 weeks as with fattening hybrids.

Why didn’t you draw more clear attention to this issue before?

On the one hand, we thought the facts were so clear that we were still not going to allow almost all of the supply of chicks to go overseas. Then, the politicians made us believe, until the day before the vote in Bundestag, that special regulations would be put in place for chicks intended for animal feed. This was a recommendation from the Federal Council and, according to the department’s response, it was also supported by the federal government. When the law was passed, this point had suddenly disappeared.

Moreover, we were simply afraid of making ourselves vulnerable if we publicly declared that we were killing chicks. It was only when the child had long since fallen into the well that I began to explain the reasons for killing chicks. I then went on to explain publicly, through letters to the readers, newspaper and TV reports, and on social media like your blog, that I kill a million chicks here a year. And I had no negative reaction.

Our MP, Mr. Ralph Brinkhaus, once told me that it was simply no longer possible to make people understand that chicks are killed directly after hatching. It’s not true. If you clearly explain the problem, you can make it understood by almost everyone.

We simply started too late. Now we can only serve as an example for other sectors. Even if we restore equality of opportunity, we will not come back.

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