Laws preventing all forms of chick culling exist in Germany, France, and Luxembourg. Switzerland and Austria forbid shredding but allowing gasing male chicks (Austrians really love their gas chambers). There are ongoing discussions about forbidding the practice in most of Western Europe (AFAIK only the UK doesn’t have ongoing discussions).
Austrians really love their gas chambers
They’re like Alabama, Arizona, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wyoming in that aspect.
Technically, California hasn’t used that method of execution since 1993, but that’s still a lot more recent than your Austrian with the funny moustache 🤷
Is that really a good thing for the animals though? Instead of being killed right away, they will suffer a short miserable life, then be killed.
Ideally, these male chicks could be taken to an animal sanctuaries. With the scale of the industry and the rarity of farmed animal sanctuaries, it wouldn’t be possible for all of them. For the ones that can be rescued, life on a sanctuary is much better than in the wild or on a farm in a dark shed.
I think one of the problems is that you basically can’t keep many roosters together (I’m not even sure you can keep two roosters together). That means that for a sanctuary you need huge space so that the roosters don’t kill each other. So while I also buy eggs that guarantee that the male chicks will be raised, I wonder how this is supposed to work if I pay only like 50 cents per egg and half of the hatched eggs are male.
(Note that my knowledge on rooster farming comes from a German or possibly German-French documentary on that, so I might be talking out of my ass here.)
(I think I just remember that 2€/egg was the price calculated in the documentary for ethical farming without losses for the farmers. This was some years ago. To be fair - I’d totally pay that for an egg. Egg as an ingredient can be easily substituted and as a standalone dish it can be something special that I’m willing to pay for. )
