45 million new child chicks are gassed or crushed to demise yearly

It is one of British farming’s cruelest secrets. Every year 45 million newborn chicks are killed, just to keep a plentiful supply of eggs on supermarket shelves. 

The cull is of males, gassed or ground up while alive, usually within 12 to 36 hours of hatching. Only female chicks that will grow into laying hens are allowed to live.

Now the government’s Animal Welfare Committee (AWC) wants the mass slaughter outlawed, following in the footsteps of countries such as Germany, France and Italy.

And the cost of ending this cruelty in the UK? Potentially as little as a penny an egg.

That’s why The Mail on Sunday flew to the Netherlands to meet a scientist who reckons that – with his big yellow egg machine ‘Ella’ – he could soon be offering British shoppers the chance to buy cull-free eggs.

Wouter Bruins, 39, is co-founder of In Ovo, an AgriTech company which is in early talks with major British supermarkets, including Waitrose, about installing Ella in the two colossal UK hatcheries that supply most of the British market.

In Ovo has pioneered the testing of fertilised eggs, identifying them as male or female prior to hatching. Those containing males are destroyed just nine days after fertilisation which, crucially, is four days before British government scientists believe the embryonic chick inside has the capacity to feel pain. 

This is in stark contrast to the UK’s practice of sexing live chicks after hatching – when they can feel fear, as evidenced by distress calling – and then despatching males at a rate of 885,000 a week.

Most are put in a depleted oxygen chamber and given argon gas to suffocate them. Other legal methods of killing are even more grotesque. Live males can be put through a mincer or a grinder, or have their necks crushed, from the moment they’re born.

This is not done to broilers, chickens bred for their meat, since both males and females can be eaten. The cull is only of males from laying breeds involved in commercial egg production. Since they are smaller and slower growing than broilers, they are not economically viable as food.

Mr Bruins says: ‘People think of lovely old farmyards and a pretty wooden barn with chickens clucking about. It’s just not like that.

‘It’s time people understood what happens to Britain’s chicks. All those girls who lay your eggs, they have no brothers – they’re killed.

‘Chicken culling is horrible and the numbers are mind-boggling. Globally it’s six and half billion baby birds a year. It’s cruel and in environmental terms not sustainable – think of the energy wasted incubating, hatching and then killing all those cockerels. What other industry throws away half of everything it creates?’

Mr Bruins says two-thirds of 2,000 British shoppers surveyed by In Ovo did not know about chicken culling. Now they do, the same number would like to see it stopped. Sixty-nine per cent want the choice of cull-free eggs in supermarkets and 44 per cent would switch stores in search of them. Marks & Spencer is the grocer most likely to stock them, according to respondents, with Waitrose a close second.

Mr Bruins’ UK findings are in keeping with a report published in March by the AWC which advises the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Scottish and Welsh governments.

It said: ‘Government should make the routine culling of newly hatched chicks, due to their sex, illegal as soon as reliable, accurate methods for sexing eggs prior to hatch are available to be implemented in British hatcheries.’

Mr Bruins believes Ella offers this kind of technology and is inviting British supermarket chiefs to the Netherlands to see it in action.

The Mail on Sunday has already been – visiting a hatchery near the German border. For such complex technology, it looks remarkably simple. A conveyor of eggs is fed into Ella which uses an array of tiny sterile needles to pierce each shell and remove a drop of liquid through a 0.3 millimetre hole.

The sample is drawn from the allantoic, the sac inside an egg where the embryonic chick deposits its waste as it grows.

Nine days after fertilisation there’s sufficient difference between the chemical profile of male and female waste to enable Ella to sex the egg’s contents.

The microscopic holes, open for 10 seconds, are re-sealed with a biodegradable glue while in an adjoining lab a rapid chemical test is conducted using a machine that In Ovo calls a ‘highly advanced molecular detective’ .

Eggs containing a male chick biomarker are mechanically separated from those with a female chick biomarker and are sold as protein to the pet food industry.

Eggs containing an embryonic female chicken, which will go on to lay about 350 eggs across her lifetime, are returned to what is essentially a massive warm cupboard to hatch at 21 days.

It has taken Mr Bruins more than a decade to achieve In Ovo’s success rate which correctly identifies 97 or 98 eggs out of every 100. ‘I am aiming for a 99.5 per cent success rate,’ he says. ‘I doubt we’ll ever get to the perfect 100 per cent, there may always be the odd boy who slips through.’ (But these cockerels are accorded the same right to life as a broiler.)

‘Ella’ technology has been rolled out across the Netherlands and Belgium as Europe moves to outlaw chick culling, which was banned in Germany in 2022.

France followed in 2023 and Italy will enforce anti-cull legislation from 2026. In 2022, Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland and Portugal added their names to a European Parliament paper calling for an EU-wide ban.

In Ovo’s technology is leading the way, although the AWC report also outlined the possibility of using a special camera to determine the colour of an embryonic chick’s first feathers. Males often have a yellowy-white plumage while females are brown. (In Britain, however, 15 per cent of our laying hens are pure white breeds and couldn’t be sexed in this way.)

There is also speculation that one day MRI imaging combined with AI may be able to identify embryonic chick anatomy, and one Israeli company is developing software capable of managing incubation so precisely it is able to control the sex development of an egg in favour of females.

And there is a spin-off issue which needs to be addressed. The end of chick culling will interrupt the food supply for other animals.

The AWC says 70 per cent of chicks killed in UK hatcheries are sold as feed for birds of prey, zoo animals and reptiles kept as pets.

But given moves in Europe, the potential for consumer pressure and the AWC’s unambiguous call for new laws, it seems likely the UK will end chick culling.

A ban has the blessing of the British Egg Industry Council, which says ‘a number of active research projects are under way to find a long-term solution – exciting developments but some way from being commercially viable’.

However, Mr Bruins may be the man to make it happen.

Originally a biologist at the University of Leiden, he isolated the biomarker on which In Ovo’s technology is built more than a decade ago.

He says he’s still a scientist as much as a businessman: ‘I am just trying to make the world better one chick at a time.’

But while he loves animals, he’s never kept chickens and doesn’t even like eggs that much: ‘I’ll eat them in things like mayonnaise but a boiled egg? No, thank you.’