Chicken-sexing breakthrough earns award for German scientist
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Leipzig, Germany (dpa) - A breakthrough that will spare male baby chickens the chop after they hatch has won a German scientist a30,000-euro prize for animal protection.
Maria-Elisabeth Krautwald-Junghanns, a veterinarian from Leipzig, discovered a way of determining the sex of chicken embryos while they are still in the egg.
Since most poultry farms routinely kill male chicks - because they cannot lay eggs and because male fowl meat is not tasty - this will avoid unnecessary animal suffering. Discarding unhatched males still in the egg will have fewer ill effects.
Embryos are unable to feel any pain at this stage of development, studies show.
It's a touchy subject in Germany, where animal rights are a matter of hot debate and where the practice of chicken culling after hatching causes a lot of outrage. Hence the decision of Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University to award the biannual 30,000-euro Felix Wankel animal protection prize to the Leipzig professor.
