Successful attempts to zero chicks that are killed by reason of discriminating the sex of a chick before being born 'Because it is a male'

It is also known that there is a national qualification of " chief discriminator, " which is a chicken chick, which is very difficult to distinguish between male and female, and judges the gender of the newly born chick. Chicks judged to be females are raised as they are, but the eggs are born, but chicks judged as males do not produce eggs and cost too much to process meat, so they are immediately put on a shredder etc. and disposed of It will be done. In order to make such a "chick which will be killed immediately after birth" zero, it is reported that an attempt to discriminate whether the chick inside is male or female at the egg stage has succeeded.

World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin | Environment | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/22/worlds-first-no-kill-eggs-go-on-sale-in-berlin

Scientists now have a way to end killing billions of male chicks - Quartz
https://qz.com/1506697/scientists-now-have-a-way-to-end-killing-billions-of-male-chicks/

It is said that billions of male chicks have been killed annually all over the world because there is no economic merit in growing chicks in eggless chicks. There are chicks that can be killed by suffocation and some shredded chicks if there are chicks, and most of them are feeds such as reptiles. The current production system, in which the newly born chicks are killed for human activity, is condemned by many animal protection activists and others.

In the German supermarket " Rewe Group ", in order to reduce chicks that are being killed soon after they were born, we have been working on developing a mechanism that can judge gender before eggs hatch. As a result, we determined the sex of the chick on the ninth day after the egg was born and succeeded in developing a method to reduce the number of chicks that will be killed soon after hatching by keeping only female eggs with hatcher at that time Did. Eggs born from the female chickens selected by this new mechanism are said to be lined up in Berlin supermarket under the trade name " Seleggt ".

Ludger Breloh, director of Selegt, said, "This technique eliminates the need to kill live chicks." The development of a method for sorting chicks before hatching is said to be done globally, "All the developers are moving towards the same goal of" eliminate chicks that are killed ", who It is not a matter of winning or losing whether or not we succeed in development to the next generation, "Breloh says.

Breloh says that breakthrough has occurred because Professor Almuth Einspanier of Leipzig University used chemical markers and developed a method to detect hormones contained in eggs containing female chicks. Mixing with the liquid collected from the fertilized egg on the ninth day after the birth of the chemical marker developed by Mr. Einspanier, the marker turns blue when the egg is a male with a determination accuracy of 98.5%, and in the case of the female it becomes white It is said to have discolored.

Next, Mr. Breloh routinely tests at a factory that discriminates a large number of chicks, so it was forced to make a device to easily determine the sex of the chick easily. So it seems that he asked a company called Hatch Tech in the Netherlands to develop an automatic machine that tests eggs with chemical markers.

There was also a need to keep the egg out of the hatcher for more than two hours so that the machine was easy to use for everyone, accurate and hygienic, and could hatch properly after judging sex. The biggest problem was that "to extract the test liquid from the egg without hurting the egg". HatchTech develops a method to empty a small hole with a width of 0.3 mm with a laser and apply a pneumatic pressure to the shell of the egg and squeeze out only a single drop of liquid because of a hygienic problem when making a hole in the shell with a needle or the like He said that he did. By using this process it is now possible to collect test liquids in just 1 second from a single egg.

The machine discriminates the female ovum of the fertilized egg on the ninth day after birth, and the egg judged as male at this point will be processed to feed before the chick is born. And only eggs judged to be females will continue breeding with hatchery. The chick which was judged sex by this method at the beginning of 2018 hatched, and the egg which was born from the growing chicken was shipped to the supermarket in Berlin in November 2018.

The Rewe Group will ship Seleggt to the supermarket throughout Germany in 2019 and in 2020 will set this technology in an independent hatchery and I would like to expand the same model throughout Europe in the future. "The preparation of the market is already in place, and Germany has become a pioneer concerning the prenatal sex judgment of the chick," said Julia Klöckner , Germany's Federal Food and Agriculture Minister.