Easter isn’t just about rabbits; it’s also about eggs—not the delicious vegan chocolate kind, sadly, but the real baby chicken kind, as businesses who profit from placing chicken-hatching projects in schools promote their in-class kits.
Capitalising on children’s curiosity and love of animals, these programmes are sold as a way to teach animal husbandry and introduce children to a chicken’s life cycle, but they send the wrong message about animals, and chickens often die as a result.
Here are five reasons classroom hatching projects score an “F” on their report card and what you can do if your school plans one.
They Destroy the Mother-Baby Bond
Typically, in Australia’s various chicken-hatching programmes, a dozen or so fertilised chicken (or duck) eggs are delivered to a learning facility inside a brooding box fitted with a heat lamp. Far from “teaching kids about a chicken’s lifecycle,” this set-up immediately omits the most vital part of the process—the nurturing mother hen— meaning kids start the lesson with a warped view of the family relationships animals hold dear.
Given a chance, hens are devoted mums, nesting on their eggs to keep them warm and “chattering” to their unhatched chicks just as an expectant human mother might talk to her unborn baby. This comforting collection of clucks and purrs ensures that hatchlings can immediately recognise their mother’s voice, even in a noisy group!
Of course, the bond doesn’t end at hatching. In nature, chicks stick close to their mum for around 6 weeks, following her actions as they learn to forage. Mother hens keep a watchful eye on their babies, gathering them under her wings to protect them.
Classroom Chicks Often Die Where They Hatch
Another important duty of a mother hen is to ensure a healthy baby emerges at the end of the 21-day gestation period.
To this end, hens gently turn their eggs at careful intervals throughout the day and monitor moisture levels.
Too often in classrooms, chickens are left unattended after hours and over the weekend, and an incubator can never replicate the attention of a mother. As a result, improper egg rotation can cause chicks’ organs to stick to the sides of the shells, and inconsistent heat can cause disabilities or death.
Should eggs hatch over a weekend, the newborn chicks are left to fend for themselves and sometimes die shortly after, and chicks can also die while in transport back and forth from out-of-hours care.
Kids Aren’t Always Gentle
Kids are tactile learners who often don’t know their own strength when handling a tiny, fragile animal. Despite this, hatching projects encourage handling, and chickens born in classrooms are subjected to noise and rough handling for 6 hours every day. As prey animals, chickens like to always have their feet on the ground and picking them up is stressful for them.
Kids start developing empathy from age 4, making childhood a perfect time to learn respect for animals’ autonomy and inherent value. Having children hand chickens back within a fortnight teaches them that animals have a shelf life dependent on their attention span, not the animals’ lifespan!
The Chickens Who Live Rarely Retire
Chicken-hatching companies proffer an ‘efficient’ system, where chickens and their incubators are delivered to the classroom and collected around 12 days after delivery— but what happens to the chickens then?
Some suppliers allow families and staff to apply to adopt the birds, but this can cause even more issues, as chickens are often dumped at shelters when kids grow bored of them or when the cute chick turns into a giant and noisy rooster.
Most chickens, though, are separated by gender. Male chicks are useless to egg producers and are therefore killed, while females are disseminated to breeders and poultry farms to become layers at about 20 weeks old.
Hens, like us, don’t ovulate forever, and those used for laying eggs are slaughtered when production drops—at around 5 years old in small-scale operations and at just 18 months in commercial settings.
Zoonotic Disease Risk is Real
Chickens can expose children to pathogens like salmonella and campylobacter, and their feathers and faeces may trigger severe allergic reactions.
We’re also living in the age of avian flu, and breeding even more chickens is a recipe for disaster because we don’t know where, when, and how mutated the next outbreak will be.
One 2018 study warned that more bird flu “conversion events”—where a less pathogenic virus strain becomes more dangerous—have occurred in Australia than in China, and amateur bird breeding means an avian flu strain that’s deadly to humans could soon be right in our own backyard (literally).
What Should I Do If My School is Planning a Hatching Project?
No matter what “high welfare” standards companies boast, animals aren’t classroom supplies like a pencil case or a globe. They’re living, feeling individuals with their own thoughts and desires.
If a school your child attends or one you teach at plans to use chicken-hatching projects, please share the information here with them and suggest alternatives.
Encouraging younger children to use a basket, straw, and a plush chicken to set up a “mother hen nest” is a lovely activity that teaches empathy. Older kids can tap into technology and replicas, like the Chick Life Cycle Exploration Set, which comes with 21 eggs kids can crack open to reveal chicken life stages.
The PETA US TeachKind chick-hatching slideshow (PowerPoint download) is also a free and humane resource for educators.
Grown-up, but want to expand your empathy skills? Download your FREE ‘Every Animal Is Someone’ empathy kit here!
Help Animals in 2025: Renew Your PETA Membership!
