Inside Industrial Chicken Hatcheries: Animal Equality Footage

Undercover footage released by the animal-protection group Animal Equality shows what happens to chicks in their first hours of life inside industrial hatcheries: newly hatched birds tipped onto conveyor belts and spinning sorting tables, handled at high speed, and in some cases injured or discarded while still alive. The video below circulated widely in 2016 under sensational headlines. Here is what it actually documents, how commercial hatcheries work, and how the law is changing.

A word of warning: the video contains distressing scenes of animals being injured and killed. The still image above shows only chicks on a sorting carousel, but the footage itself goes further.

What the footage shows

Animal Equality is an international nonprofit that runs undercover investigations on farms and in slaughterhouses. In November 2015 it published footage from Spanish industrial chicken hatcheries, which it described as the first time such images from inside Spanish hatcheries had been shown. According to the group, the recordings showed chicks still alive being thrown away with waste, workers pulling off chicks' heads while trying to kill them, sick birds left to die slowly in bins, and chicks dying during transport to farms.

The reposts that spread in 2016 gave the location loosely, claiming it came from an American factory or describing similar practices in the UK, and some put the view count at around 30 million. Neither claim could be confirmed. The scenes are consistent with Animal Equality's 2015 Spanish investigation, and the group later documented similar problems at a Foster Farms hatchery in Waterford, California, so it is safest to say the practices shown are not limited to one country.

The original advocacy text that accompanied the video described chicks being "processed as if they were parts in an assembly". That is Animal Equality's framing, but the images themselves do show a production line in which living birds are moved by belts, chutes and rotating tables.

How an industrial hatchery works

Commercial chicken hatcheries are factories for eggs that are about to hatch. Fertilised eggs from breeder flocks are cleaned, checked and placed in large incubators that control temperature and humidity and turn the eggs regularly. A chicken egg takes about 21 days to hatch. Around three days before the expected date, the eggs are moved to a separate hatcher unit, where they are no longer turned so the embryos can position themselves to break out.

Hatching usually spreads over a 24 to 48 hour window. Hatcheries deliberately set large batches at once so that the birds are similar in size and can be raised, and later slaughtered, together. A large hatchery can produce around 15 million chicks a year.

After hatching, chicks are separated from shells and unhatched eggs, counted, inspected and often vaccinated. Many are sorted on rotating tables like the one in the image above. Newly hatched chicks still carry the remains of their yolk sac, which is why they can travel to farms before their first meal and drink. That biological fact is also what makes long transport and delays possible, which welfare groups argue increases suffering for weaker birds.

Meat chicks and egg-laying chicks

Two different industries depend on hatcheries. Chickens raised for meat, called broilers, are bred to grow very quickly, and both males and females are raised. Hens for egg production come from separate laying breeds. Male chicks of those breeds will never lay eggs and do not grow fast enough to be profitable as meat, so in most of the world they are killed shortly after hatching. This practice is known as chick culling.

Estimates of its scale vary, but around seven billion male chicks a year are thought to be culled worldwide, including roughly 350 million in the United States. Common methods include maceration in high-speed grinders and gassing with carbon dioxide. The video focuses on chicks headed for meat farms, but it is useful to know that hatcheries for egg-laying hens raise a separate, even larger welfare question.

What the law says now

Hatchery practices are regulated in many countries, though rules focus on how animals may be killed rather than whether. In the European Union, Regulation (EC) No 1099/2009 lists approved killing methods and requires that animals be spared avoidable pain. The scenes Animal Equality filmed, such as live chicks discarded with rubbish, would generally breach those standards rather than represent legal practice.

Several countries have gone further on chick culling. Germany and France were the first to ban the routine killing of male chicks, from 1 January 2022, and Austria and Luxembourg have similar rules. Italy has set a ban to take effect at the end of 2026. Instead of hatching males, more producers now use in-ovo sexing, technology that identifies the sex of an embryo inside the egg so male eggs can be removed before they develop. By 2025 an estimated 28 percent of EU laying hens came from eggs sexed this way. Switzerland and parts of Belgium have banned grinding while still allowing gassing.

Reading undercover footage carefully

Undercover investigations have played a real role in changing animal-welfare law, but they are produced by campaign groups and edited to make a point. A fair reading asks a few questions. Where and when was it filmed? Are the worst scenes typical of daily practice, or rare failures? Did the company or regulators respond? Animal Equality's Spanish and Californian investigations named specific facilities and in the Californian case the group sued Foster Farms in June 2022 under the state's unfair competition law, which suggests the incidents were treated as serious by more than activists alone.

At the same time, headlines such as "monstrous things" or "leaked footage" can blur the details. The strongest case the footage makes does not depend on exaggeration: in a system that handles millions of fragile animals at high speed, even a small failure rate means a large number of individual birds suffer.

What consumers can do

If the footage leaves you wanting to act, there are practical options. You can eat less chicken or fewer eggs, or none at all. Where you do buy, look for higher-welfare certifications that set standards for breeding, transport and slaughter, and for eggs labelled as coming from in-ovo sexed or "no-kill" supply chains in countries where these exist. Supporting clear labelling and stronger enforcement of existing welfare law also matters, because many of the worst scenes in undercover videos are already against the rules.

Above all, it helps to remember that hatcheries are rarely visible to the public. Whatever you decide to eat, knowing how the first day of a farmed chicken's life works is the starting point for an informed choice.

Sources: Animal Equality: The cruelty behind industrial chicken hatcheries revealed (2015); Animal Equality: Lawsuit over cruelty in Foster Farms hatchery (2022); Wikipedia: Chick culling; Wikipedia: Hatchery; Simple Capacity. Video: Animal Equality.

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