Against chick shredding!
Of course, juicy roast chicken is a culinary delight all year round. But especially in the summer, we tend to eat chicken more often because it goes well with fresh salads and crisp vegetables and - if there is a small piece left over after grilling - it makes a delicious cold snack for lunch the next day. If the chicken was also raised in a humane way, the enjoyment is perfect. But more and more producers are claiming trendy terms such as animal-friendly or sustainable for themselves and even the big discounters have now jumped on this lucrative bandwagon and have developed their own labels that promise animal-friendly or species-appropriate husbandry.
Inga Günther, Managing Director of Ökologische Tierzucht GmbH, breeds the eco-chicken of the future.
The supply of whole roast chickens, chicken parts and eggs has never been as large as it is today, and this is due to the fact that the poultry industry has now developed into the most industrialised part of agriculture. Food is coming onto the market in large quantities and is being sold off at cheap prices. Because we, the consumers, apparently want it that way. And the "individual product" - we are talking about living creatures here, after all - yields so little for the producer that the hoped-for profitability can only be achieved through enormous sales volumes, coupled with specialisation in individual production areas and extremely lean processes. It is therefore understandable that the priority in this system must clearly be on the effectiveness of production output. This in turn creates fertile ground for the horror images of plucked, bleeding or dead chickens that reach us every day, thanks to social media. And this does not only affect conventionally kept animals; unfortunately, these images are not unknown even in the organic sector. Here, the conditions of keeping animals have improved in comparison and animal welfare is taken into account, for example with outdoor areas, sand baths and a lower stocking density in the stables, but the laws of profit maximization often apply, which are contrary to sustainability and animal welfare. Anyone who has a problem with the industrial structures of these types of farming can now find a number of alternatives from which they can buy a chicken and enjoy it. Not at dumping prices, of course, but ethically acceptable.
Of brother roosters and dual-purpose breeds
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland there are various organisations that support the rearing of brother roosters - this refers to the male chicks from laying hens, who usually have an extremely short life. Around 48 million of them are killed in Germany every year as so-called day-old chicks because they neither lay eggs nor are profitable as broilers. This is everyday practice, regardless of whether fattening and egg production are carried out according to conventional or organic guidelines. FIRE&FOOD dealt with this issue four years ago, and at that time various federal states were on the way to putting a stop to this practice. However, courts had overturned corresponding decrees, such as those initiated by the Consumer Ministry in North Rhine-Westphalia. But not necessarily to the detriment of animal welfare, as critics of the draft law made clear. They feared that a strict ban on killing would simply shift the problem abroad, with the eggs being transported there before they hatch and only the laying hens making their journey back to Germany as young animals. The brother rooster initiatives such as BID (Bruderhahn Initiative Deutschland), Stolze Gockel, Basic Bruderherz-Initiative, Alnatura Bruderküken Initiative, Haehnlein or Hahn im Glück are among the pioneers in this field and mostly offer organic farms that are at least certified according to the EU organic regulation to participate in their programs.
The principle is the same for almost all of them - a few cents per piece is added to the eggs of the laying hens, which cross-subsidizes the rearing of the brother animals. Depending on the initiative, the brother roosters have between 15 and 25 weeks to reach their slaughter weight. By comparison: conventional broiler chickens have to do this in five weeks. Annalina Behrens, co-founder of the Haehnlein concept in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, points out the taste advantages of this method: "Brother rooster meat is much more finely marbled and more aromatic than meat from turbo chickens." The eggs and meat from the initiatives mentioned and others are available in organic and farm shops, from suppliers of vegetable boxes and in some organic supermarkets. BID maintains a list of suppliers by postcode at www.bruderhahn.de/haendlerliste . But the conventional supermarket chains are not sitting idle either. In 2016, Rewe was the first company in this sector to initiate the Spitz & Bube free-range egg pilot project together with producers, in which the brother chicks are also raised - compared to conventional broilers, they are allowed twice as long until the slaughter date.
Inga Günther, Managing Director of Ökologische Tierzucht GmbH (ÖTZ), also supports the BID principle. The initiative is supported by the organic associations Bioland and Demeter. Both the BID and the ÖTZ see the rearing of hybrid laying hens as only a temporary solution. They rely on dual-purpose breeds in which laying and meat production are as balanced as possible. This is not an easy task, as there is a genetic contradiction between laying performance and meat production. This means that breeding purely for laying performance reduces meat production and vice versa. Characteristics that agricultural companies have been exploiting for around 60 years in specializing their hybrid chickens. These are the same companies that have monopolized chicken breeding at the expense of biodiversity and in favor of high-performance egg and chicken meat production. Most organic suppliers currently have to resort to this gene pool due to a lack of alternatives - at least those who also focus on high performance. A total of four global companies dominate the market: EW Group, Hendrix Genetics, Groupe Grimaud and Tyson. The chickens from their breeding programs can only pass on their high-performance characteristics to a very limited extent, which is why each new generation has to be purchased from these breeding farms. A never-ending cycle that is very lucrative for the companies mentioned. Only a few countries have invested energy in protecting their own, proven breeds from this development. In France, for example, this includes the various species of the Bresse chicken family. The Bresses Gauloises, the first chickens with which Inga Günther began her breeding of dual-purpose chickens in Überlingen on Lake Constance in 2012, come from this line. In 2015, the newly founded ÖTZ was able to take over two more flocks from the Domäne Mechtildshausen. A stroke of luck: the Hessian Bioland company had worked with poultry farmers from the University of Halle for years. The genetic material of the chickens came from the stocks of the state-owned GDR breeding program and was therefore uninfluenced by western corporations. The agricultural scientist is proud to be very close to the "dual-purpose chicken" today, but "breeding development is an ongoing process - here too, the path is the destination," emphasises Günther in conversation. With the chickens she breeds, both the hens for laying eggs and the roosters as fattening animals are economically independent. It is important to the expert that the animals, as dual-purpose chickens, can produce more than just meat and eggs. They should also be healthy and hardy and able to cope with local feed from the farm - feed that a broiler chicken would not survive on. "Since BSE, chickens have been forced to eat a vegetarian diet, but this is not species-appropriate. Protein-rich feed such as soya from overseas is used as a substitute for animal protein, as this is cheap and comes closest to animal protein. In the long term, I hope that the chicken will once again be seen as what it is: hens and roosters as perfect users of leftovers within a diverse agricultural cycle and not as competitors for human food," says Günther, explaining her motivation for making the dual-purpose chicken her life's work.
A question of ethics and morality
It is really exciting how much has already happened in the last four years to avoid the ethically dubious killing of chicks. The federal government is taking a different approach to this issue, as Federal Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner announced in a statement at the beginning of April this year: "Killing male chicks because they are the wrong sex is morally unacceptable. We must end the killing of male day-old chicks as quickly as possible with a practical alternative - I welcome all initiatives that bring us closer to this goal, such as the current research results from the TU Dresden. My department is following the path of research: since 2008 we have been funding sex determination in chicken eggs with around five million euros. With our support, two promising procedures have been developed, which are now being brought to practical maturity by the project partners." Let us hope that these procedures will soon be ready for practical use. But this will not change the living situation of the hatched turbo hens. So once again, it is up to us as consumers – let’s vote with our purchasing behavior on whether something should change in the direction of animal welfare.
Siegbert Gerster advocates ethical chicken farming and offers interested consumers the opportunity to sponsor a chicken. In return, they benefit from the eggs. Recommended for imitation, in our opinion. www.unser-familienhuhn.de