They're usually shredded alive almost immediately because they're seen as "waste" since they don't lay eggs
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Never understood this. Why not raise the roosters for their meat and feathers and leave the hens for laying eggs?
I presume, like everything else wrong with Capitalism, it comes down to cost. It's more cost efficient somehow. I don't understand the details, because I'm not a chicken farmer, but I have been in the capitalism machine for a long, long time, and I'd bet a shitton of tax payer money that it's purely down to cost.
If it saves $0.02 per chicken, they'll gladly poison the rivers, oceans, lakes, etc. with refuse and baby chick corpses.
In this case it's because if you raised them no-one would want to buy them. The egg laying breeds are a lot tougher and have a lot less meet than the ones bred for meat. They also cost more per amount of meat in the end.
The simple fact is that people don't want to buy that, so it'd just be wasteful to grow them out.
Right. So cost savings.
Not mostly, mostly consumer preferences. You wouldn't be able to sell them and it'd just be wasteful
That's a lie. Old chickens are tough, usually only egg laying breeds get old. "Egg laying" varieties are not tough at basic maturity. Taste better too, than the commercial meat breeds. I'm specifically getting chicken wings from egg laying breeds because the skin is thicker and crisps up better than fast growth meat breeds (run a bar)
I suspect the optimized egg laying DNA is different from the huge breasted good tasting chicken meat DNA.
So the male born egg laying DNA chicks are unfortunately not useful to the farmers except for whatever they used the ground up remains for, which I suspect is probably feed or fertilizer.
Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.
Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they'd need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they'd rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.
The hens are bred for laying as much eggs as possible, on the cost of meat production. this means, that it isn't profitable to raise them, just to get some meat, when you can raise other chicken breads to get twice the amount of meat.
I am guessing, only based on the fact that the immorally fast growing chickens only make a few more cents, that they are not profitable.
Also I am not sure if roosters can be kept together past a certain point maybe?