Germany will be the first country to ban the mass shredding of male chicks in the poultry industry, said a government which has presented itself as an animal welfare pioneer after approving a draft law on the controversial practice. 

The measure, which was passed by the cabinet on Wednesday, looks to enforce a ban on chick shredding from 2022 in what the country's agriculture minister Julia Klöckner called a "significant step forward for animal welfare." 

Animal welfare activists have been campaigning for a long time for the practice to be put to an end, but farmers have insisted that there is no practical, affordable and cruelty-free alternative. 

Now Klöckner says that technologies developed at the University of Leipzig to determine the sex of chicks before they hatch are expected to be widely available by the time the ban comes into force. The new law states that egg-sexing methods should be generalized in order to destroy male eggs before hatching. 

The bill presented by Klöckner also sets a second deadline of 2024 for unhatched males to be identified before the seventh day of incubation, when chicken embryos are reported to begin to feel pain, according to the amendment. The hatching process typically takes 21 days. 

"We have invested millions of euros in alternatives, bringing animal welfare and economic efficiency together on German soil," said Klöckner. "These currently allow us to determine between the ninth and the 14th day of incubation, out of 21, the sex of the embryo of the egg." 

The new law will support innovative techniques with the aim, from 2024, of being able to determine the sex before the sixth day of incubation, in order to "further improve animal welfare."

"I expect the industry to follow up on these announcements with concrete actions and to modify its product range accordingly," added Klöckner.

Setting the pace

As Germany is the first country in the world to end the practice, Klöckner said that it wants to "set the pace and be a role model for other countries." 

It is common practice in many poultry businesses for male chicks to be separated from females soon after hatching and be killed solely for economic reasons, such as not being able to produce eggs and reportedly producing less meat. 

Laying chickens are a different breed to those that have been specifically raised and bred for meat production, which have larger muscles and legs. 

The systematic killing of male chicks takes place around the world, but in Germany alone, around 45 million are killed each year shortly after hatching. 

Some animal rights groups, such as Deutsche Tierschutzbund, have criticized the slow pace of progress. 

In June 2019, the highest German administrative court granted the poultry industry a delay, allowing the practice of eliminating millions of male chicks to continue until the advent of methods allowing sexing in the egg. 

At the beginning of 2020, Klöckner and her French counterpart Didier Guillaume had shown their willingness to abandon this practice in their respective countries by the end of 2021. 

This wasn't well-received by all parties. The German Poultry Federation claimed that ending their current methods "results in immense competitive disadvantages with the EU for the domestic poultry industry" and that the law "only provides a partial solution to the problem." 

In January 2020, Switzerland banned the grinding of live chicks. Nevertheless, the country still permits their gassing. In France at the end of 2021, two new measures including the banning of chick shredding and male pig castration without anaesthesia will also be enforced.