The alternate YT frontends on my PC stopped working for a while and I couldn’t get my adblocker to work on YT so I just endured the ads for a while, and while really all the ads are profoundly annoying, this one annoyed me especially.
Transcript in Norwegian
Kvinne: Hanen eller egget? Nå kan vi faktisk velge.
Fortellerstemme: Hvert år har millioner av hanekyllinger blitt avlivet i Norge, fordi de ikke kan legge egg. Nå kan hanekyllingeggene plukkes ut lenge før de klekkes, med en ny teknologi som gjør det mulig å se kjønnet etter at egget er befruktet.
Kvinne: For det skal alltid være godt å velge [merke].
Liten tekst nederst på skjermen: Gjelder alle [merke]-egg fra 2025.
Own translation
Woman: The rooster or the egg? We can actually choose now.
Narrator: Every year, millions of cockerels have been euthanized in Norway because they cannot lay eggs. Now, cockerel eggs can be plucked out long before they hatch, using a new technology that makes it possible to see the sex after the egg is fertilized.
Woman: Because it should always be good to choose [brand].
Small text at the bottom of the screen: Applies to all [brand] eggs starting 2025.
The fucking audacity of making an ad where you just straight-up say your business savagely murders millions of baby animals a year and is still murdering baby animals at an industrial scale literally at the present moment, only to then act like this is the brand you should choose if you care about animal welfare — because “hey, at least they’re gonna stop savagely murdering millions of baby animals In A Few Months.”
Sexing unhatched eggs improves their profit margins. This brand was perfectly fine with mass murder for years, there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that anything has fundamentally changed about them. There is no good egg brand to choose if you care about animal welfare because the industry is fundamentally exploitative of animals. Why the fuck would an egg brand even attempt to pull an animal welfare angle in its advertising‽ Why the fuck would the actress and the narrator and the scriptwriter and the cinematographer and the sound designer and the 3D animator and the VFX guy and the director and whoever else, think that this ad would do anything other than make people question whether they should eat eggs at all‽
Holy Hell I need to become a vegan like yesterday, this shit is fuuuucked.
Do you not see humanity breeding chicks into existence solely to be shredded to bits as fundamentally different from having the bad luck of being eaten by a predator?
Why are you arguing as though being eaten alive by a predator is the only alternative?
That’s a good point; I considered whether a chicken could understand the difference between being shredded and being hunted, and I suspect that they would prefer the slower death if there was a chance of survival. But that’s more of a quality of life issue than a “die or not die” issue.
The moral stance of “you shouldn’t have animals that have no life other than the bare minimum in order to be consumed by a human or another animal” is stronger than the stance of “animals shouldn’t be killed in large numbers”.
The thing is that the chicks being killed by the millions within hours of hatching, and the animals having no life aside from the bare minimum needed to satisfy human greed, are two sides of the same coin. I pointed out that the animals are killed young and by the millions, because rhetorically that evokes cold, systematic, industrial extermination, and is furthermore the phrasing actually used in the ad. That my problem is not simply with the quantity of animals killed, or the age at which they die, but in fact rather with the entirety of the industry, should’ve been obvious from the fact that I wrote, “There is no good egg brand to choose if you care about animal welfare because the industry is fundamentally exploitative of animals” — “fundamentally” meaning in this context “regardless of whether they cull chicks or not”
So my moral stance is not “animals should not be killed young and/or in large numbers, i tochka” — my moral stance is that human beings do not need to kill or assault animals in order to survive, human beings are in fact capable of empathy and morality, and so if we see ourselves constructing a system of industrialized exploitation that murders baby animals by the millions (really, billions), then we should be able to say that this is a cruel and entirely unnecessary affair and that something has gone terribly wrong with the world that we could ever reach such a point. My moral stance is that there is a straight line from deciding that it is OK to immediately kill most all the male or unhealthy chicks on the basis of improving profit margins, to declaring that entire groups of human beings are “useless eaters” who deserve extermination.
That is what makes chick culling savagery, but not other animals’ predation of chicks in the wild. I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on inside a chicken’s head, but what I will say is that when our species has built a machine of death of Biblical proportions fine-tuned to be as efficient in its one goal as possible, that this is representative of an exploitative hierarchy between humans and other animals. I would in fact not see it that humans would ensure that every single chick in the wild makes it to maturity, because if humans could and would do this, it would mean that the hierarchy between humans and animals has not actually been abolished — we would’ve simply replaced the commodity we get from them.