The culling of male layer
chicks will soon become a thing of the past.
raising male layers to slaughter age regardless of the ex- pense. The poultry sector, however, was moving at a totally different speed. With the culling of DOCs having been com- mon practice for many years, not illegal in any state and with no viable alternative to hand, most of the sector was not real- ly interested. Having said that, more visionary industry pro- fessionals could see in which direction the debate was mov- ing. Realising that a technique would become available at some point in time, they embraced the idea and teamed up with research and development institutes at various universi- ties. One of them, Friedrich-Otto Ripke, chairman of the Zen- tralverband der Deutschen Geflügelwirtschaft (ZDG), said in 2018, “We are fully aware we have to stop the culling of male layers as soon as possible. It is our industry’s biggest ethical issue by far”. Others, like the Seleggt consortium of Hatchtech, Rewe and the university of Leipzig took up the challenge and began developing a method, machine and marketing concept for producing brotherless laying hens.
From theory to reality It was the hands-on approach of Seleggt that resulted in the first big breakthrough. Using a prototype of their concept and with German retailer Rewe on board, they were the first to have commercially available consumption eggs on supermar- ket shelves, produced with no male layers hatched. After al- most a decade of research, the first eggs were sold in 2018 in
10 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 3, 2020
nine supermarkets in the Berlin area. Since then they have rapidly expanded to 200 Rewe stores and those of its dis- count brand, Penny. In 2019 Penny was offering the eggs na- tionwide and other supermarkets soon followed. In Germany Edeka, Marktkauf and Famila sell the brotherless eggs, while a growing number of France’s Carrefour supermarkets now has them, and since March 2020 the Netherland’s second largest supermarket chain Jumbo has signed up for them. The technical implementation of the sex determination pro- cedure and its associated patents are held by the Seleggt consortium. The sex determination takes place on the ninth day of the hatching process. A small hole is made in the egg using a fine laser beam. A drop of fluid is then extracted with a needle. The sex determination is based on hormones found in the urine of the embryo. The colour of a marker fluid indi- cates whether the embryo is male or female. This analysis takes approximately half an hour. During that time the hatch- ing eggs are ‘on hold’. The eggs are first candled before the technique is applied. The analysis is only performed on ‘living’ embryos. “The analysis takes place around the ninth day of in- cubation because the embryos do not yet have a ‘conscious pain experience’ at that point,” explains Martijn Haarman, di- rector of both Seleggt and Respeggt. “The eggs with a female embryo are placed back into the in- cubator, the male eggs are then removed and processed into animal feed raw material. Seleggt has an agreement with
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