Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
This doesn't provide a distraction from other animal welfare issues, it fixes one of the many issues that exist while others are being solved. Whether or not male chicks are ground up, hens will still live horrible lives. The only option is to create lab-grown egg facilities and not involve any chickens at all, or eat plant-based replacements (which aren't all soy or Just egg, though those are both options).
IMO, we can't farm animals without exploitation and should rethink our food system, but it would be great if in the meantime, we stop breeding and killing all of these sentient animals as part of the egg industry.
What I mean is, this is the sort of issue that industry, politicians and special interest groups like to focus on, because it is easy to argue about and build an emotional case for and developing solutions won't change much about the status quo of the horrific conditions of mass poultry farming.
I agree with you, we need to totally rethink and replace the food system. I also think that the result of solving this particular issue won't reduce the aggregate suffering in the system - if, for example, the total number of chickens produced is half of before, but all chicks are ensured to be hens, then the chickens in aggregate will suffer proportionally more (in total days of suffering per chicken hatched) than if there was an even split of males and females being hatched - but it will provide something for the industry to point to as "improving" while nothing fundamentally changes. And eggs will probably become cheaper and people will eat more of them.
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
I guess, where I get confused is why grinding up baby male chicks is terrible, but letting chicks grow into adult-hood so we can kill them and eat their flesh is significantly...less bad I guess?
Why not just aim for the banning of killing any animal for any reason? Is it a specific "scale" problem? Killing 5 chickens or chicks is fine. But 100 is horrible? Is it 1000? 100,000? 1 million?
Letting them grow to adulthood while giving them an opportunity to experience a decent sort of "chicken existence" (i.e. able to indulge in natural chicken-like behaviours etc.) definitely seems preferable to just killing them at birth. But killing them at birth is definitely better than forcing them to stay alive in cruelly constrained/unnatural conditions. Better still is preventing their growth into baby male chickens (which presumably do have the capacity for pain/some sort of awareness of existence - as I noted in my other reply, can bond and interact with humans) in the first place.
The only option is to create lab-grown egg facilities and not involve any chicks at all.
And after that, somebody would still try to convince us that eating spider eggs is murdering innocent spiderlings. Thanks but, not thanks. This spiral of nonsense must stop.
Comments
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
This doesn't provide a distraction from other animal welfare issues, it fixes one of the many issues that exist while others are being solved. Whether or not male chicks are ground up, hens will still live horrible lives. The only option is to create lab-grown egg facilities and not involve any chickens at all, or eat plant-based replacements (which aren't all soy or Just egg, though those are both options).
IMO, we can't farm animals without exploitation and should rethink our food system, but it would be great if in the meantime, we stop breeding and killing all of these sentient animals as part of the egg industry.
What I mean is, this is the sort of issue that industry, politicians and special interest groups like to focus on, because it is easy to argue about and build an emotional case for and developing solutions won't change much about the status quo of the horrific conditions of mass poultry farming.
I agree with you, we need to totally rethink and replace the food system. I also think that the result of solving this particular issue won't reduce the aggregate suffering in the system - if, for example, the total number of chickens produced is half of before, but all chicks are ensured to be hens, then the chickens in aggregate will suffer proportionally more (in total days of suffering per chicken hatched) than if there was an even split of males and females being hatched - but it will provide something for the industry to point to as "improving" while nothing fundamentally changes. And eggs will probably become cheaper and people will eat more of them.
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
I guess, where I get confused is why grinding up baby male chicks is terrible, but letting chicks grow into adult-hood so we can kill them and eat their flesh is significantly...less bad I guess?
Why not just aim for the banning of killing any animal for any reason? Is it a specific "scale" problem? Killing 5 chickens or chicks is fine. But 100 is horrible? Is it 1000? 100,000? 1 million?
Letting them grow to adulthood while giving them an opportunity to experience a decent sort of "chicken existence" (i.e. able to indulge in natural chicken-like behaviours etc.) definitely seems preferable to just killing them at birth. But killing them at birth is definitely better than forcing them to stay alive in cruelly constrained/unnatural conditions. Better still is preventing their growth into baby male chickens (which presumably do have the capacity for pain/some sort of awareness of existence - as I noted in my other reply, can bond and interact with humans) in the first place.
Chicks are not mammals, and chicks are not humans
And after that, somebody would still try to convince us that eating spider eggs is murdering innocent spiderlings. Thanks but, not thanks. This spiral of nonsense must stop.
How is being a "mammal" relevant?
After raising chickens myself, the little goblins are smarter than they appear.
It's still honestly kinda cruel that we profit on and proliferate their species at the expense of immediate death for half their population.