The chirping begins hours before dawn. On a given morning, tens of thousands of chicks hatch from their warm ivory shells under the glow of artificial incubators at Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. These chicks will eventually become egg layers on small farms, homestead or in backyard coops across the country. The facility's floor is covered in eggshells and reeks of sulfur from the slow-cooking of infertile eggs alongside still-incubating fertile ones.
For every baby bird that is hatched and sold, an equal number of fluffy newborns are disposed of, swept by the trayful into plastic-lined garbage bins and wheeled into rooms where they will be gassed, hours after pecking their way into a fluorescent-lit world. While some of the deceased will be frozen as food for rehabilitated raptors nearby, most will be dumped into landfills. The reasons for an untimely death at the hatchery could be the misfortune of being hatched a "roo" instead of a pullet, having a visible illness or developmental irregularity or simply being born in a cohort of too many chicks. This is an unavoidable part of hatcheries like Murray McMurray, as the unpredictability of hatching new life coupled with fluctuating demand for certain breeds incentivizes them to incubate more eggs than they can feasibly sell as chicks.
