Reducing pain and suffering is better than not doing anything at all, and it's childish to assume that we can do anything more than regulate our food habits, and perhaps a couple of those around us. I'm vegan; I'm not deluded enough to think that my eating habits are anywhere near mainstream. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight for animal agriculture, whatever my personal feelings may be about that, so the next best thing one can do is reduce suffering where possible, and in-ovo sexing in hatcheries works a small way towards that.

Not getting to be born again (which by the way no one actually knows what that means) is different from not being born at all in the first place.

Of course the original premise is impossible, because no one knows how be unborn either.

if those are the two choices, then i'd prefer the later.

but isn't there a third choice? to raise chicken in good conditions?

i suppose maybe that doing so would reduce the amount of chicken we can consume, and also raise the price, but i think that is preferable to letting them suffer.

While I get your overall point, I'd just like to point out the island of Kauai (and the rest of the islands of Hawaii). They have a massive wild chicken population.

If no one is willing to do something humanely, then no one deserves to have it. It's not a complicated analysis.

The company I work at worked on this one: https://inovo.nl/

What is amazing to me, is that this is using MRI, which is a very expensive technology. Eg simple scans are very expensive for a consumer. But here, following your link, the MRI tech is in use, capable of acting 24000 eggs an hour, and can check not just for sex, but also for cracks in the shell, air sack placement, etc.

Adam Smith didn't phrase it like that, and many people have mistaken "similar" for "identical" when this is absolutely not so (we also didn't have a deep understanding of what's now called Goodhart's law until much later), but it has made a huge difference to the quality of life of many people despite the things it does wrong.

Also don't forget that we don't, and never have, lived in a pure free market, and that governments can and do pass laws to restrict what business are permitted to do — lots of money to be made in selling cocaine and heroin, both used to be sold as cough medicine, and then the law changed.

[0] phrased weirdly because most people disagree about how to draw the "ethics" vector, too.

Even one example of correlation between two things is sufficient to disprove any claim that those two things are exclusive.

Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better. We discard half of all hatched chicks. I eat eggs. I decided to accept that ugly fact. If you don't, stop eating eggs and poultry. Or raise your own chickens. Anything else is hypocrisy. At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals.

Technology can help. Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot. Usually when I am buying or eating eggs it is easy for me to not think about discarded male chicks. Then I pray for forgiveness.

I prefer to buy eggs where the label says they are from free-range chickens, however.

Organic is a different protected term in the UK that has additional conditions, such as a more humane limit on the density of the hens' accomodation and stricter dietary requirements.

It's a really complicated issue with some fierce lobbying from the intensive farming industry to loosen the welfare requirements, but suffice it to say that there is a 'euphemism treadmill' of constantly changing terminology depending on whether the factory farming or the welfare lobbies have the upper hand at any given moment.

Killing male chicks after birth has been forbidden in France since 2022 though, eggs must be sorted before birth.

Moral outrage is supposed to turn into law and then it has to be done, economical or not. It can work, not everything has to be seen through the lens of money.

How does that work then? Do we already have technology to do this?

After the egg is laid and has cooled off, a bubble forms in the wider end of the egg. If you candle the egg the bubble will either be centered in the end of the egg if its male, or the bubble will be offset and not touching the end point of the egg at all.

No clue if it will actually work but interestingly enough we did get roughly a 50/50 split from our chickens. I guess we'll find out in about 9-12 weeks if the trick actually worked!

Here's the right link! The paper is from 1921, this page should have a link to the full text.

Just started our incubator today with 24 female eggs and 3 males per the bubble, we'll see what happens!

  The Circuit uses a laser to create a tiny hole of 0.3 mm (0.01 in) in the shell of all fertilized hatching eggs. A minimal amount of allantoic fluid is then extracted from the hatching eggs and placed into an external marker.

It's that layers upon layers of obfuscation are used to hide the terrible facts.

There's even terms to describe this, such as "how the sausage is made".

There is a difference though. According to Wikipedia, the remains of female chicks are later used in cat food and fertilizers. Anyways, the idea is that it is not wasted. Throwing yolks down the drain is just waste.

Or at least that's what I've seen. It is actually not that easy to find information about what is done after chick culling. Almost all sources focus on the ethics of killing. But I think what is done with the remains doesn't get enough attention.

We kill to eat, directly or indirectly, vegans less than meat eaters, but there is no way around it unless we make radical change to society, and by radical I mean stuff like genocide or science fiction level technology, so, no. So I think we need to settle for the next best thing, that is making sure all that killing is put to good use.

So, if the chick remains are wasted I agree that something needs to be done. If the remains are used for feeding cats in a way that reduces the need for other food sources (like chicken people could eat), then it is not as bad. Gruesome, sure, but at least, it is not a meaningless death, that's what fed your cat.

I don’t understand the ethical framework here. Is it just that you feel bad? Then, why do you feel a need to impose your feelings on others who don’t necessarily feel the same way? If you are saying this because of a belief system, it’s unclear. Can you name or explain it?

I believe in Islam. Our God told us in revelation that He created animals for our consumption, thus we see nothing wrong with killing and eating them. (Our prophet told us to minimize the suffering of an animal while killing it.) Being omniscient, God has the knowledge to definitively determine moral and immoral actions. Being the omnipotent creator and ruler of everything, He has the authority to order humans to behave as per his ethics. Thus I preach God’s morality as I see it. From my viewpoint, I am self-consistent. Now think about your situation. Why should the feelings of fallible people just like me should determine at all how I should act? Are you self-consistent?

Hope this doesn’t come across as offensive, rather legitimate questions to think about. Feel free to point out any mistakes.

Re "free-range" chickens: TIL that this is not an useful label in some countries. Thanks for pointing this out. This needs some more research, especially what this means where I live.