With the support of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and SELEGGT, the Rewe Group has now succeeded in presenting a market-ready method for sex determination in the hatching egg, which aims to end chick shredding in Germany. You can now buy respect eggs!
The Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, Julia Klöckner, and SELEGGT Managing Director Dr. On November 8, 2018, in Berlin, Ludger Breloh and the deputy CEO of the REWE Group Jan Kunath presented the market-ready method for sex determination in the hatching egg. The SELECT process is a huge success in the fight against chick killing. You can find out exactly what the so-called respect eggs are all about here.
Consumers expect more commitment to animal welfare
In Germany alone, 45 million male chicks are shredded every year – their rearing is uneconomical because male chicks do not put on enough meat when fattened.
For this reason, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) has been funding methods for sex determination of chicks directly in the hatching egg for years with a total of around five million euros. The aim of the procedure is that male chicks are not hatched and are killed immediately after hatching. Thanks to the SELECT process, there will be no need to shred chicks in the near future.
More and more people are speaking out against the killing of animals and factory farming – large retail chains are now trying to react to consumers, taking responsibility and playing an important pioneering role. buy respect eggs now
Customers can now buy the first free-range respect eggs in 223 Rewe and Penny stores (only in Berlin for the time being). The respect eggs “without killing chicks” have a seal on the packaging and each individual egg is marked with a “respect” stamp. By the end of 2019, these eggs will be available for sale in all German Rewe supermarkets and in the group’s own Penny stores.
The increase in the price of eggs is hardly noticeable to consumers. The 6-pack of respeggt eggs should only cost 10 cents more than a free-range pack of the same size.
Both the responsible Rewe manager and the SELEGGT managing director are in favor of wanting completely abolishing chicken shredding in Germany. To make this possible, they want to make the process available to the entire industry as a cost-neutral service as soon as it is mature.
Germany is thus the first to introduce a method that can end the killing of chicks in hatcheries. From 2020, the first hatcheries will be offered the patented process for use. Whether this will then also be mandatory for hatcheries or can only be used on a voluntary basis is still unclear and will probably cause further discussion in the future.
Select method: This is how the sex in the hatching egg is determined
The method is based on endocrinological sex determination in the hatching egg. The nine-day incubated egg is first checked for fertilization. Once it is fertilized, lasers are used to create a pinhole in the incubator and a small amount of allantoic fluid is removed.
This procedure has no negative effects on the incubation egg since the inside is not touched. The sex of the chicks can be determined by the allantoic fluid. The accuracy of the determination would be around 98 percent with this method.
The male incubator eggs are processed into high-quality feed and the females go back into the incubator. The small hole that was created closes itself again. On the 21st day of incubation, the female chicks hatch.
