What they do with them is kill them at hatch. Chicks are sexed, and the boys of egg laying breeds die while they’re still just fluff balls.
Spent laying hens seem to mostly go into dog food or compost.
They cull them, freeze them and sell them as feed.
Possibly other things, but the feed part i know about.
Zoos, Wild Life rehab, exotic pets etc.
Its kind of sad to open up a giant freezer that is just filled with vacuum sealed bags of frozen chicks but an Owl’s gotta eat?
They dont go into human food
Hear, hear! We didn’t put the eggs in a brooder either, and simply considered any chicks as a bonus. We never had the broody hens steal the other girls’ output.* For egg layers, they kept pretty close to the replacement rate with a trip to the feed store to buy a couple of their chicks every few years. The shipment I mentioned some distance upthread were exotics. DesertRoomie loved Polish chickens (I called them 'splodey-head chickens).
We did have a single-egg brooder we obtained to take to the local school’s science class.
*Whatever happened to the theory about the female’s investment in making sure her gene-line was continued?
At a former residence, there was often a pickup truck parked on the street with a bumper sticker that read
WANT TO GET LAID? CRAWL UP A CHICKEN’S BUTT AND WAIT AN HOUR
Babies are not born from the butt! The ignorance pissed me off, and I really wanted to leave a note pointing out what a dumbass the guy was, but I decided to do some research first.
It turns out that a hen’s vagina is completely internal, and that both eggs and feces are passed out of an external orifice called the cloaca. However, the egg is protected from contamination during the exit process.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/06/chicken-reproduction.html
Here’s a link to general information about the egg-laying process. Nature is amazing.
Avian Reproductive System—Females
Breeding, we bred them to lay as much as possible over how ever many centuries, and that means not breeding those who are very broody in nature.
Plus humans keep taking the eggs which removes the trigger to brood (no clutch)
but some of the lil buggers have figured out how to circumvent that by egg borrowing.
But you aint seen nothing until you have seen a little bantam cochin hen pushing and rolling a duck egg to her little corner nest so she can sit on it.
The ducks dont care, they never go broody (Pekin and Rowan)
Then what’s the stuff that I have to wash off the eggs whenever I collect them from my mom’s chickens? Sure, sometimes they come out clean, but more often they don’t.
Chicken poop.
So, what is that “trigger”? It’s not like the hen returns to her nest and thinks “Oh, no egg? I think I will lay one.” And likewise, what is the trigger to stop laying once n eggs are present?
Yeah, and you can take eggs from under a broody hen all you want, and she’ll just sit her butt down on nothing. It’s not a pile of eggs that triggers broodiness, but I don’t know what does.
I found a couple more sources that claim eggs are not exposed to feces during laying. I found no sources that claim otherwise. The consensus is that feces on eggs comes from tracking.
My grandmother raised chickens, and I’ve seen the poop of which you speak. It always appeared to me that the hen had defecated on the egg. They poop everywhere else, why not on their eggs?
The trigger is some strange biochemical process i could not begin to explain.
But having the clutch of eggs gives them a physical stimulus that helps set things off.
I have no idea exactly how it works, i don’t even know that it has been terribly studied well.
If you have a hen that is prone to brooding, fill a nest full of eggs.
Next thing you know, she is in brood mode.
He body temp goes way up, she ceases laying, and remains on the nest eating and drinking very little.
Some wont even leave the nest to get food and water.
But taking the eggs away after the fact will do nothing you are way too late, she will sit on the nest sometimes until she gets sick weak and dies if there is nothing to hatch.
That, i have a feeling, is a result of human interference with breeding, i cant see nature making that choice.
Nature breaks the brood mode by going PEEP PEEP!
Chicks hatch and it snaps the hen out of the brood cycle.
Don’t ask how, i do not know how it works, it isn’t a timed cycle though.
To break the brood mode with out chicks, you have to drop her body temp back down to normal.
I do not know why, or how this sets her body back into normal mode, but it does.
The few i have that are prone to brooding dont need anything to trigger it but a clutch of eggs to set things off, and they are crafty and will attempt to borrow eggs to assemble a clutch.
If the eggs are not gathered fast enough, they will put themselves in brood mode and then i have to break them out of it or they will simply sit in an empty nest and not eat or drink and loose tons of weight very quickly.
They mostly poop while standing on their perches (there are piles of it right underneath the perch), but very little in the straw-filled boxes they use as nests. Even with the messiest of eggs, there’s still almost no poop in the straw right next to the egg.