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Chick Hatching
Chick Hatching
Many educators have stopped using chick-hatching projects to teach embryology because of concerns about student safety, animal welfare, and childhood development.
Chick-hatching projects pose hidden dangers to school children. A 1999 analysis of chicks in Seattle schools found that nearly all chicks tested were infected with E. coli and salmonella, leading to a ban on all hatching projects in Seattle schools. A new threat to the U.S., West Nile virus, is carried by birds, including chickens.
There are other concerns: Many of the birds in classrooms
grow sick and deformed because their needs are not met during
incubation and after hatching. Has your school provided for
the veterinary care of the chicks who are hatched in the classroom?
Care for chicks is complicated! Teachers can be overwhelmed
when faced with sick or deformed chicks, and the deaths of
the birds can be traumatic for children. When the experiment
is over, the problem of what to do with the surviving chicks
can be frustrating for teachers because many schools do not
plan for this. Animal shelters already overwhelmed with unwanted
cats and dogs are left to deal with chicks every spring. Commercial
farms will not take the chicks because of the danger of infecting
their flocks with disease, so the chicks are usually put to
death.
What to do instead of chick-hatching experiments? United Poultry
Concerns (UPC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating
the public about the plight of chickens, recommends several
alternatives
to chick-hatching projects. UPC's suggested resources
include the following:
 Egg:
A Photographic Story of Hatching is a beautiful book
that "captures the very moment of hatching in extraordinary
close-up photographs?from the first crack in the eggshell
to the newborn bursting free" by Robert Burton with photographs
by Jane Burton and Kim Taylor.
 A
Home for Henny, a book written by UPC founder Karen
Davis and illustrated by Patricia Vandenbergh, tells the
story of a grade-school chick-hatching project and a chick,
Henny, who is going to be disposed of but who finds a happy
home at a sanctuary, thanks to a student named Melanie and
her parents.
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