美国国家公共电台 NPR Technology May Rescue Male Baby Chicks From The Grinder

Technology May Rescue Male Baby Chicks From The Grinder

play pause stop mute unmute max volume 00:0003:34repeat repeat off Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser¹ to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: 

If you want eggs, you need chickens, female chickens. So every year, the hatcheries that breed new chicks for egg producers slaughter² hundreds of millions of them because they are male. But thanks to some new technology, that practice might soon be on its way out. NPR's Dan Charles has the story.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE³: Matt O'Hayer is in the egg business. He's CEO of Vital Farms, which sells eggs from hens that run around outdoors on grassy⁴ pastures at a hundred different farms. But until a few years ago, he'd never thought much about where those hens come from or what happened to their male siblings⁵. Then one day, he ran into a couple of people from the animal rights group PETA.

MATT O'HAYER: I told them what I was doing for a living, and they said, oh well, that's horrific. And I said, why is that? They said because what happens to the male chicks?

CHARLES: And that's when O'Hayer learned about what happens at the hatcheries that supply his farmers with their hens. Those hatcheries incubate fertile eggs from breeding flocks. But the hatcheries only want female chicks because they're working with a breed of chickens that's only used to lay more eggs. It's not raised for its meat.

O'HAYER: It's kind of bred to lay eggs and not to gain weight. They are mainly egg-laying machines, and the male of the species has no value.

CHARLES: But there's no way right now to screen the fertilized⁶ eggs quickly to see which embryos⁷ are male or female. Instead, teams of workers inspect each newly-hatched chick. They keep the females. But the males - well, they get killed instantly in a machine that grinds them up - 300 million of them each year in the U.S.

O'Hayer was horrified⁸. He started looking for a way to end this. And he wasn't alone. Here's Chad Gregory, president of the United Egg Producers.

CHAD GREGORY: It's been an issue that the international egg industry has been dealing⁹ with and trying to sort out and trying to find commercially available and economically feasible solutions for years now.

CHARLES: The industry has been under pressure from animal welfare groups, but also, hatching and then destroying male chicks wastes money. Now Matt O'Hayer from Vital Farms says after years of searching, he has the solution. Vital Farms teamed up with an Israeli company called Novatrans, which found a way to analyze¹⁰ the chemical makeup¹¹ of gases that leak from the pores of an egg.

O'HAYER: We are able to trap the gas, read whether it's male, female or infertile¹² and do it a number of seconds as opposed to minutes.

CHARLES: O'Hayer says they can do this before the egg even goes into the incubator, so early you can sell the eggs with male embryos as regular, edible¹³ eggs. O'Hayer expected to have a commercial version of this invention up and running within a year, and he may have competition. In Canada, a scientist at McGill University is working on a way of sexing eggs by shining light through them. German researchers are working on yet another approach.

David Coman-Hidy, executive director of the Humane¹⁴ League, an animal welfare advocacy group, says last summer he was pushing the egg industry to promise to stop killing¹⁵ male chicks by the year 2020.

DAVID COMAN-HIDY: Now that we've seen these new folks trying to get these contracts as quickly as possible and there's a lot of motivation behind that, I think we might see this change happening even sooner.

CHARLES: Once one of these technologies proves that it works, he says, companies will rush to adopt it. Dan Charles, NPR News.

1 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。

2 slaughter   

n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀

参考例句：

• I couldn't stand to watch them slaughter the cattle.我不忍看他们宰牛。
• Wholesale slaughter was carried out in the name of progress.大规模的屠杀在维护进步的名义下进行。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 grassy   

adj.盖满草的；长满草的

参考例句：

• They sat and had their lunch on a grassy hillside.他们坐在长满草的山坡上吃午饭。
• Cattle move freely across the grassy plain.牛群自由自在地走过草原。

5 siblings   

n.兄弟，姐妹( sibling的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• A triplet sleeps amongst its two siblings. 一个三胞胎睡在其两个同胞之间。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• She has no way of tracking the donor or her half-siblings down. 她没办法找到那个捐精者或她的兄弟姐妹。 来自时文部分

6 Fertilized   

v.施肥( fertilize的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The study of psychology has recently been widely cross-fertilized by new discoveries in genetics. 心理学研究最近从遗传学的新发现中受益匪浅。
• Flowers are often fertilized by bees as they gather nectar. 花常在蜜蜂采蜜时受粉。

7 embryos   

n.晶胚；胚，胚胎( embryo的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Somatic cells of angiosperms enter a regenerative phase and behave like embryos. 被子植物体细胞进入一个生殖阶段，而且其行为象胚。 来自辞典例句
• Evolution can explain why human embryos look like gilled fishes. 进化论能够解释为什么人类的胚胎看起来象除去了内脏的鱼一样。 来自辞典例句

8 horrified   

a.(表现出)恐惧的

参考例句：

• The whole country was horrified by the killings. 全国都对这些凶杀案感到大为震惊。
• We were horrified at the conditions prevailing in local prisons. 地方监狱的普遍状况让我们震惊。

9 dealing   

n.经商方法，待人态度

参考例句：

• This store has an excellent reputation for fair dealing.该商店因买卖公道而享有极高的声誉。
• His fair dealing earned our confidence.他的诚实的行为获得我们的信任。

10 analyze   

vt.分析，解析 (=analyse)

参考例句：

• We should analyze the cause and effect of this event.我们应该分析这场事变的因果。
• The teacher tried to analyze the cause of our failure.老师设法分析我们失败的原因。

11 makeup   

n.组织；性格；化装品

参考例句：

• Those who failed the exam take a makeup exam.这次考试不及格的人必须参加补考。
• Do you think her beauty could makeup for her stupidity?你认为她的美丽能弥补她的愚蠢吗？

12 infertile   

adj.不孕的；不肥沃的，贫瘠的

参考例句：

• Plants can't grow well in the infertile land.在贫瘠的土地上庄稼长不好。
• Nobody is willing to till this infertile land.这块薄田没有人愿意耕种。

13 edible   

n.食品，食物；adj.可食用的

参考例句：

• Edible wild herbs kept us from dying of starvation.我们靠着野菜才没被饿死。
• This kind of mushroom is edible,but that kind is not.这种蘑菇吃得，那种吃不得。

14 humane   

adj.人道的，富有同情心的

参考例句：

• Is it humane to kill animals for food?宰杀牲畜来吃合乎人道吗？
• Their aim is for a more just and humane society.他们的目标是建立一个更加公正、博爱的社会。

15 killing   

n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财

参考例句：

• Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
• Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。