Each year around 29 million day-old male chicks are killed in the UK.
Born to egg-laying hens, they are much smaller and leaner than those born to birds which produce meat.
As they are not suitable for chicken production, they cost a lot to raise and do not lay eggs.
As a result, they are destroyed en masse by being crushed or gassed, a practice labelled as barbaric by campaigners.
But a breakthrough developed by scientists in Israel could help end the annual culling of billions of male chicks around the world, all thanks to genetic modification.
“This is a world first and the only solution that is easy for industry players to implement,” says embryologist Dr Yuval Cinnamon from Israel’s national agricultural Volcani Centre.
He has worked for seven years to figure out how to edit the genes of egg-laying hens so that when they are carrying male embryos, these do not progress and hatch.
The Israeli team has worked in conjunction with the UK-based animal welfare organisation Compassion in World Farming (CIWF).
Its chief policy adviser Peter Stevenson said that the breakthrough could be a “really important development” for animal welfare.
“Normally I am very wary of using gene editing of farm animals. But this is an exceptional case and I, and my colleagues at CIWF, are supportive of it,” he said.
CIWF estimates around seven billion male chicks are slaughtered globally by the egg-producing industry each year shortly after they are born.
The process is time consuming for firms too as they sort males from females shortly after they hatch by hand.
The German government banned the mass killing of male chicks at the start of this year, and the French have similar proposals to start in the new year. So far, there are no plans to ban it in the UK.
Dr Enbal Ben-Tal Cohen, who led the research, said: “I hope the industry will adopt it very soon.”
