Nearly eight billion male chicks a year
The egg industry killed around 7.8 billion male chicks in 20241. That is about 21 million chicks a day, or roughly 250 every second, and almost one chick for every person on Earth2.
None of them appear in the world’s meat statistics. The 78.5 billion chickens slaughtered for meat each year are counted separately, and these chicks are extra. The number is also growing: it rose by 11% between 2019 and 2024, about 2% a year1.
Why the egg industry kills its male chicks
Chick culling is the practice of killing newborn male chicks in the egg industry, usually on the day they hatch. It happens because the chickens that lay our eggs and the chickens we eat are two different breeds.
Laying hens have been bred to produce as many eggs as possible. Their brothers can’t lay eggs, of course, and they have not been bred for meat either, so they grow far too slowly to be sold as broilers. To a hatchery supplying egg farms, a male chick has no commercial use. Roughly half of every hatch is male, so for every laying hen on a farm, a brother was killed at the hatchery.
How the chicks are killed
The most common method in the United States and Australia is maceration, which means the chicks are fed into high-speed industrial grinders. In Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland they are more often gassed with carbon dioxide or an inert gas. In parts of the developing world, chicks are reportedly suffocated, a method the American Veterinary Medical Association considers unacceptable. In the EU, only grinding and gassing are allowed1.
An estimate, because nobody counts them
No government or UN body counts culled chicks, so the number on this page is an estimate. It comes from Faunalytics, an animal-advocacy research group1.
Their method is simple, which is a point in its favour. They take the official number of egg-laying hens from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and work out how many brothers those hens must have had, allowing for the length of a laying cycle and for hens that die along the way. They checked the result against US Department of Agriculture data, which recorded 638 million egg-type chicks hatched in the United States in 2023. Still, it is a model rather than a count, and it deserves more caution than an official statistic.
Most of the killing happens in Asia, which accounts for 69% of the global total1. That is mostly a reflection of where the world’s laying hens are.
Checking the sex before the chick hatches
There is a way to avoid killing the chicks at all: find out whether an egg holds a male or a female before it hatches. This is called in-ovo sexing, from the Latin for “in the egg”. The male eggs are taken out before they hatch, so no male chick is ever born.
Several methods are now in commercial use. One takes a tiny sample from the egg around day 8 or 9 and tests its DNA, with over 99.5% accuracy. Another scans the egg with a special camera around day 13, which so far only works for brown-egg breeds. A newer method uses MRI scanning and can be used on any breed1.
The cost is small. Sexing an egg costs about 1.6 to 2 euro cents, while a 2023 survey found US consumers willing to pay around 65 US cents more per dozen eggs, or roughly 5 cents an egg1.
The countries that have banned it
Germany was the first country to ban chick culling, from January 2022, and it tightened the rules again in 2024. Austria followed in July 2022 and France in January 2023. Italy has passed a law that takes effect in 2027, and Switzerland moved to in-ovo sexing voluntarily, reaching full adoption by 20251.
The effect is already visible. About 40% of the EU’s laying hens now come from eggs that were sexed before hatching1.
Where this could go
This is one of the few numbers in the food section with a clear way down. The technology exists, it adds only a fraction of a cent to the price of an egg, and Europe has shown that a law can move its own egg industry within a few years.
The catch is geography. Europe’s bans cover a small share of the problem, and in Asia, where more than two thirds of the chicks are killed, in-ovo sexing has barely started. That is why the world total kept rising even as Europe cut back. Whether it turns downward will probably depend less on new technology than on whether the largest egg-producing countries in Asia decide to follow Europe’s lead.
The chickens slaughtered for meat, counted separately from the chicks.
Chickens slaughtered for meat
Globally, this year
These chicks are also missing from the count of every land animal slaughtered for meat. The rest of what the world raises and eats is in the food section.
