France bans crushing and gassing of male chicks from 2022
By Reuters
PARIS, July 18 (Reuters) - France will ban from next year the killing of male chicks by crushing or gassing, a practice denounced as barbaric by animal welfare groups, and will push for a similar measure at European level, the agriculture minister said on Sunday.
Each year, 50 million male chicks are culled in this way, Julien Denormandie said in an interview posted on the website of daily Le Parisien. Only females, future egg-laying hens, are kept alive.
"France is the first country in the world, along with Germany, to end the crushing and gassing of male chicks," Denormandie added.
The two countries will try to convince their European Union partners to outlaw the practice at a council of EU agriculture ministers on Monday, he said.
From 2022, breeders in France will instead need to equip themselves with machines to detect the sex of chicks before they hatch.
"The dynamic is well underway and, given the orders already placed, the machines will be installed for two-thirds of production in France by the end of the first quarter of 2022," Denormandie added.
The measure is expected to lead to an extra cost of 1 euro cent per box of six eggs, he said.
To help breeders buy the equipment, France will grant subsidies totalling 10 million euros ($11.8 million).
The castration of live piglets will also be prohibited from the start of 2022, Denormandie said.
Ukraine attacked a power substation in Russian-occupied Crimea, an oil depot and railway station in Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and an oil refinery in the port town of Tuapse overnight, a Kyiv intelligence source told Reuters.
Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico remains in intensive care, the government said on Friday, two days after he was shot at close range in an assassination attempt that stunned the small Central European nation and drew international condemnation.
The Kuwaiti Speciality Hospital is one of the few places in Rafah the wounded or dying can turn for care, but that role may come under unbearable pressure if Israel launches a full-scale advance into the southern Gaza city, doctors there say.
Ukraine attacked a power substation in Russian-occupied Crimea, an oil depot and railway station in Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and an oil refinery in the port town of Tuapse overnight, a Kyiv intelligence source told Reuters.