Industrial egg production is the vast majority of egg production. Using the word only there is perhaps a bit misleading when for instance, 98.2% of US egg production is from factory farms [1]

I'm not sure one can call any of those methods painless either

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

The industry is slowly evolving away from it tho. I've seen "no chick killing" or something similar on labels in German shops.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/chickens-egg-industry-humane.html

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The technology for it that currently does not scale to higher egg consumption rather well among other potential problems

They have not yet tried to sell the technology to the US egg industry but, even if they did, the volume it can handle is currently too low for this technology to be used to get rid of chick culling across the board.

[…]

One issue that complicates these efforts is the difficult-to-answer question of when an embryo becomes a chick. Some researchers say day seven is when chick embryos can begin to experience pain. If that’s right, sexing the eggs eight to 10 days after incubation as Respeggt does, and 14 days as Agri-AT does, may still end up inflicting pain on the embryo, which could be trading one animal welfare problem — culling — for another

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22374193/eggs-chickens-animal-welfare-culling

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago

Culling unhatched eggs seems less cruel to me than culling <1 day hatchlings. Cute-bias, I know.

Seems to scale somewhat in Europe, talking many many millions of eggs per year too.

At least trying is better than nothing.

Not saying it's perfect, but tech is advancing thought it would be interesting to add that to this thread...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

That is because it got forbidden. They never would do something that lessens their profit without being forced to do it.