It's very strange to kill male chicks, I'm eating capon instead of regular chicken nowadays because it has much more flavor and a better bite. If people would simply eat them more they also don't have to be killed. Castration is not super animal friendly though.
Egg laying hens are bred for different traits than the ones for meat. So the male chicks of egg laying hens would probably grow more slowly and to a smaller size than ones bred for meat. Thus their meat would be more expensive.
I've always wondered if you could market this as "vegetarian chicken" under the rationale that eating it doesn't cause an increase in net animal death. It may be more expensive but plenty of things are sold as more expensive for the ethical version.
At the end of the day, my suspicion is even most vegetarians don't like being confronted with the realities of egg production.
Nope, that's the same faulty reasoning people use to justify purchasing leather. As if making the killing of cows more economical is somehow a good thing, and acting like demand for the product itself isn't going to cause companies to act to meet it and increase net animal death. It's completely naive.
I'm simply stating that raising them to eat is better than just gassing them immediately. If you're against eating meat as a principle then it's probably pretty useless. But eating the less wanted meat or produce really helps preventing pollution through overproduction of food that is never eaten.
There are many people that think it's more ethical to kill a cow just for it's meat than to eat the meat of a horse, which is never bred just for it's meat.
Both capon and horse meat are tastier than chicken and veal.
>I'm simply stating that raising them to eat is better than just gassing them immediately.
I think that is more of an ethical debate than a fact. One could argue that most farmed chickens live a life of suffering, and keeping them suffering long is not better than gassing them immediately.
> I'm simply stating that raising them to eat is better than just gassing them immediately.
On what basis, though? From a humane perspective, the quicker you kill a chicken the less suffering it does, and it's not like the culled chicks are ultimately wasted.
I see your point, it was just the wording of "not killing" which I found a bit odd. The environmental argument makes sense, the ethical argument depends on many factors.
> Millions of horses are raised every year for their meat.
I don't know enough about the numbers worldwide to give you real hard data but the majority of all of the horse meat consumed worldwide is not from horses bred with the sole purpose to breed it for it's meat. I have the idea that it's not more than 30%.
Also the horses that are primarily bred for food are for a large part free roaming in places where other cattle simply wouldn't survive. This in contrast to other meats (chicken, veal, pork) that are often raised in factory like environments.
True, I assumed it was "never" as the exported/imported horse meat I knew was a byproduct of a country that simply had a huge horse culture and a taboo on eating the meat at the same time. But I gathered some information and it seems that there are herds bred purely for consumption. TIL!
There's a lot more at play than just killing vs not killing. Some types of killing may be acceptable, and some may not. For example meat-eaters, which as you pointed, effectively kill animals, may disagree with other ways of killing - for example movies production or fur coats.
The most interesting case I've heard about this subject is in the movie Cannibal Holocaust. Among the other animals, two monkeys have been killed for script purposes, however, they have been eaten afterwards. Which are the ethics of this killing? There's no absolute answer¹
