Responding to pressure from animal welfare advocates, United Egg Purchasers (UEP) has agreed to stop killing male chicks at hatcheries by 2020, says Vox. New technology will enable the companies to tell the sex of the chick while still in the shell, so that the males can be painlessly disposed of before the eggs hatch. The UEP group represents 95 percent of all eggs raised in the U.S.
Male chicks are often thrown into a grinder after birth, since they don’t serve an economic purpose: they can’t lay eggs and they aren’t considered good meat birds. Undercover footage of these gruesome deaths at a hatchery in Canada helped push UEP to make the change. But Unilever, which raises eggs for Ben & Jerry’s and Hellman’s Mayonnaise, amongst others, was the first company to announce that it would stop male-chick killings in 2014 and adopt the new technology, known as in-ovo egg sexing.
UEP came to its decision after negotiations with a lesser known, but increasingly influential advocacy group called The Humane League. With only a handful of employees working on laptops, the group has managed to win 35 corporate victories, including convincing the foodservice giant, Sodexo, to use only cage-free eggs.