Eggs US – Price – Chart

If it were actually impossible to have affordable eggs without confining chickens to tiny cages for their entire lives, that would be a damning indictment of our entire food system.

But luckily that isn't actually the case. The price difference between cage-free and "caged" eggs is negligible. I'm in New York City, not known for its local egg production, and I can still get cage-free eggs for $4/dozen. Kroker/Walmart is just ripping you off.

I think the most brutal thing is when the male chicks are immediately sent into a shredder damn. Out of sight out of mind

That's where I can be a proponent of lab-grown meat without consciousness

Sure, it's brutal; but roosters don't get along. You would have to have a huge amount of space to raise all the males. For mammals, you can castrate the males and raise them for meat, but that's not feasable for birds.

A messed up thought is I wonder if they have looked at trying to get chickens to produce only female chicks not sure how some hormone or the eggs are injected without compromising integrity

You should see what the roosters do when we let them live…

Looking around, this seems like an area with a lot of interest (for a long time, usda has a description of a pamphlet from 1921 [1]).

Here's a scientific looking study about adjusting incubation temperature in Korat Chickens. [2]

TLDR: higher than standard temperature results in similar hatch percentage, but more genetic female, morphological male chicks. Lower than standard temperature results in a lower hatch rate, but more genetic male, morphological female chicks.

I saw some less scientific articles that attributed higher surviving female chicks at lower incubation temperature to male chicks being less likely to survive in those conditions, but since this paper did genetic analysis, it appears there's some amount of temperature dependent sex determination in addition to genetic sex determination. I didn't look around to see if I could find a paper showing this in more typical US livestock breeds of chickens, and at least from these results, it seems like while the proportion of female to male chicks increased, the number of female chicks at 5 weeks after hatching, did not due to differences in mortality.

I also saw a news release about giving the mothers stress hormone and seeing more female chicks, but that artificial hormones is not acceptable practice in the poultry industry, so they were looking for other ways to induce that reaction. [3]

I also saw some references to determining (presumably genetic) sex before hatching, which could lead to earlier intervention, which may be more humane. It didn't look like there was anything definite there, but I'm going to stop going down the rabbit hole here.

[1] https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/ipd/frostonchickens/exhibi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645652...

[3] https://www.poultryworld.net/health-nutrition/stressful-bird...

My understanding is that the main improvement being implemented is determining the sex before the eggs hatch, and destroying the eggs.

My rooster was a jerk, but he deserved to die the way he did, which was the way he lived: picking fights with things that could kill him in an instant if they bothered to care. I'm glad that he died fighting the beak and talons of an osprey or bald eagle, and not to the remorseless (literal) machinery of market efficiency.

> For mammals, you can castrate the males and raise them for meat, but that's not feasable for birds.

capons? We've been doing it for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capon

EDIT: possibly you meant non-feasible since it's too expensive anyway, which it probably is.