Male layer chicks are culled by the billions every year, and the practice is not an ancient farming tradition but the direct result of a series of 20th-century breeding decisions that split chickens into two entirely separate animals. For roughly 8,000 years, chickens were dual-purpose livestock, with a single breed providing both eggs and meat. That changed dramatically within just a few decades. The first crack appeared in 1923 in Ocean View, Delaware, when farmer Cecile Steele accidentally received 500 chicks after ordering only 50.
She raised the extras for meat instead of eggs, and her profitable mistake launched the broiler business, creating the first distinct commercial separation between meat birds and layers. That separation hardened in 1948 when the A&P grocery chain and the USDA sponsored the “Chicken of Tomorrow” contest, a nationwide breeding competition to create a bird that grew faster and packed more breast meat on less feed. At the same time, egg producers were independently selecting hens purely for maximum egg output, with little regard for size or muscle. Within two decades, these two breeding tracks had diverged so completely that meat chickens and egg chickens became functionally incompatible animals.
Modern broilers are bred to gain weight at an astonishing rate, reaching market size in under six weeks. Modern layer hens are bred for lean efficiency to lay nearly 300 eggs a year. Genetics for both industries are now controlled by just a handful of multinational breeding corporations. A male layer chick, however, cannot lay eggs and also carries the slow-growing, low-muscle genetics of its egg-laying breed, making it economically worthless to raise.
The result is that roughly half of all layer breed chicks, males, are sorted out within hours of hatching and killed, usually by instantaneous mechanical maceration or gas exposure. Worldwide estimates put the number of male layer chicks culled annually at six to seven billion. The industry adopted this practice quietly for decades, and it only became a public issue when animal welfare organizations in Europe publicized undercover investigations in the 2010s, which led to legal challenges in Germany and consumer pressure across the continent. To answer the problem head-on, European scientists developed “in ovo sexing,” a technology that determines a chick’s sex while still inside the egg, days before hatching, allowing male eggs to be redirected to animal feed before a chick ever develops.
Germany banned the culling of male chicks in 2022, becoming the first country to do so, and France followed with a comparable ban soon after. Austria and Italy are moving toward similar standards, and major European grocery chains now demand the technology from suppliers even where it is not yet mandated. The technology remains expensive and is still almost entirely absent from the US and much of the rest of the world. However, egg production in the United States is the direct product of this system, even if most consumers are unaware of it.
The culling of male chicks was not an inevitability but the endpoint of a chain of ordinary decisions, beginning with a shipping mistake in Delaware and a breeding contest in 1948, decisions that compounded until an entire half of a species became disposable by industrial design.
