what shocked me

when I started to look deeper into the chicken industry

There is a moment when curiosity quietly turns into something else - clinical clarity you get when a system suddenly reveals its real logic, or real failure, or concentration on the wrong goals. Here are my shocking insights from inside the industrial and small poultry chicken world:

first: the thing everyone avoids saying out loud

Yes, in industrial hatcheries, male chicks are destroyed immediately after hatching. The most efficient method is mechanical processing. It is really as brutal as it sounds in wording, optimized in execution. And I can support that uncomfortable truth - even outside industrial systems, on small homesteads, roosters are… a big problem and annoyance. They attack hens or, at minimum, create stress where chickens stop laying. They are, most of the time, absolutely useless, and there is no way to get rid of roosters - not even if you offer money on top.

If you just start with homesteading, you will slowly discover a strange economic truth: something can be alive, healthy, and still have negative market value. I started by auditing big industrial farms and food processors, so… there is nothing that can surprise me anymore.

But that wasn’t what shocked me.

What shocked me was something much more… insulting to human intelligence. We already have the solution - not in theory, not in some distant future. We have it right now. Technologies like in-ovo sexing - using spectroscopy, color scanning, hormone detection, even DNA sampling - can identify the sex of an embryo before it becomes a chick. Countries like France and Germany are already using them and have banned chick culling. The only thing needed is proper public awareness of these processes and significant investment to make these technologies available even for small hatcheries.

And here is the scale of the absurdity:
A research-level prototype? Roughly the cost of a mid-level consulting project.
A production-ready tool for small hatcheries? The cost of a decent farm truck.

From an industrial manufacturing compliance manager’s perspective, there are many approvals needed before that - local product compliance, manufacturing lines, spectrometry testing, lab inspections… But it’s all feasible if the goal is to make it accessible in North America.

We are not talking about moon missions. We are talking about tools that could be built, refined, and distributed with effort that humanity spends daily on far less meaningful things.

We have AI models capable of detecting patterns in embryo development with a high rate of probability. We have spectrometry. We have automation.

But where are we now? We are ignoring this issue and instead teaching our children to ignore it too.

second: the disappearing act we teach children

Look at a typical school project: hatching eggs in a classroom. It starts beautifully: “Let’s research and hatch cute chicks!”
Temperature control. Humidity. Anticipation. Life emerging. Children watch chicks hatch. They hold them. They learn “biology.” Take pictures with chicks, and then? What happens after? Where do those chicks go? The story ends.

No one asks:
Where do the roosters go?
Who feeds them in the next years?
Are they raised in humane conditions?
Are they culled humanely (this is another no-no topic that annoys me)?
How much space do they need?
What happens when there are too many males?
Is the person they go to even allowed to keep chickens?

The chicks simply… disappear from the narrative.

third: genetics - the quiet catastrophe
Then comes the layer that almost no one talks about or tries to learn about: genetics.

In backyard setups and small farms, it’s surprisingly common to breed birds from the same line over and over again. Brothers, sisters, cousins - generation after generation.

And then the inevitable question appears in online groups:
“Why are my chickens sick?”

The answer is not mysterious. It’s biology.

Without genetic diversity:
Immunity drops.
Defects accumulate.
Resilience disappears.

And again, this is completely absent from educational narratives. Why are we not teaching this in schools when kids see eggs? What is the genetic heritage? Is it responsible to hatch them?

No one explains:
Where the eggs come from.
Whether the parent stock is related.
What happens after 2–3 generations.

We teach the beginning of life, but not the system that sustains it. Not even big hatcheries have full traceability of heritage, unless they are breeding for show purposes.

so what is this really about?

At some point, this stops being about chickens.

This is about how humans design systems: We optimize one variable. Ignore side effects. Not evaluating risk and impact. Hide consequences. Collect the wrong data and twist it to fit needed narratives. Teach simplified versions to the next generation. The convenient, refined, polished and not real version. Until reality catches up. Whether it’s agriculture, AI, or governance - the pattern is identical.

this is why I wrote a book for kids

Not to make them feel guilty. Quite the opposite - to make them aware. And to help them become the person in the classroom who asks those uncomfortable questions. To be able to do the research and collect data before making the decision.

To show that before you hatch an egg or adopt an animal, you ask: What happens next? What if something goes wrong? Am I ready for the full lifecycle, not just the cute beginning?Because responsibility is not something you add later. It is something you design from the start.