World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Germany after breakthrough that could save billions of male chickens

Scientists in Germany say the "Seleggt" process can determine a bird's gender before it hatches, which could put an end to the annual cull of male chickens.

An estimated four to six billion chicks are slaughtered globally every year – simply because they serve no economic purpose.

Some are suffocated, while others are fed alive into shredding machines to be processed into reptile food.

But Seleggt predicts the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised.

Male eggs are turned into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period, reports the Guardian.

Seleggt managing director Dr Ludger Breloh was at the helm of the four-year programme by German supermarket Rewe Group.

He said: “If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks.

“It’s not about winning or losing. “We all have the same goal, which is to end the culling of chicks in the supply chain. Of course, there’s competition, but it’s positive in that it keeps us all focused on that goal.”

Chick culling has become increasingly controversial.

Males are killed because they don't lay eggs and don't grow fast enough to justify the cost of feeding them up for meat.

Breloh said his first breakthrough came after he approached Prof Almuth Einspanier, who had developed a chemical marker at the University of Leipzig.

The marker is similar to a pregnancy test and can detect a hormone present in high quantities in female eggs.

Once mixed with fluid from fertilised eggs at nine days, the marker – which has a 98.5 per cent accuracy rate –  turns blue for a male and white for a female.

But Breloh then asked Dutch technology firm HatchTech to develop a machine that would make the marker test easy for use in hatcheries.

The end result was a laser beam that burns a 0.3mm-wide hole in the shell.

Air pressure is then applied to the outside of the shell, which pushes a drop of fluid out of the hole.

Taking just one second per egg, the process enables fluid to be collected without touching the eggs.

Breloh added: "It worked absolutely faultlessly. Today, female hens are laying eggs in farms in Germany that have been bred without killing any male chicks.”

Using this technology, Seleggt hatched the first brood of hens earlier this year, with the eggs being sold in supermarkets in Berlin last month, bearing the seal "respeggt".

Rewe Group plan to roll out the eggs across German stores next year, while Seleggt plans to install the technology in independent hatcheries from 2020.

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