“The name ‘capon’ is derived (via the Latin ‘capo-onis’) from the Greek verb ‘κόπτω’, meaning ‘to cut’, due to the castration of the animal for its preparation. (wikipedia)”
The capon is in fact a male chicken or pullet that has been castrated before reaching sexual maturity (i.e. around the age of about 2 months). It is a practice that aims to make it achieve greater weight, mildness and meat tenderness.
But how did we get to the capon?
Its production has very ancient origins and it appears that already in the 7th century BC, the Greeks castrated roosters. This happened because several roosters in the same henhouse were fighting; then almost all of them were castrated and peace returned.
In ancient Rome, a law forbade the keeping of hens indoors, and raising capons made it possible to ‘be in order’, especially since another advantage was also observed: while the meat of the cockerel over time becomes tough and less tasty, that of the capons remains tender and with a pleasant and characteristic flavour. In the centuries that followed, the capon went from being a ‘fallback’ to being considered, given its delicacy, a form of prestigious gift that was offered by humble people to those of ‘higher rank’ in order to receive favours and protection.
Even back then, various breeds existed, hand-picked over the centuries by shrewd breeders.
They were all dual-purpose breeds: the females (hens) produced a fair number of eggs and the males (cockerels) were bred for meat. However, they took several months to grow and often reached puberty (onset of sexual maturity) before reaching an acceptable weight to become satisfactory food for the community.
In addition to this, it is observed that sexual maturity turns cockerels into aggressive roosters that try to mate with all the hens they find around them while trying to prevent other roosters from doing the same.
Another clarification is needed to understand what goes on in an artisanal chicken coop: an equal number of males and females are born from each brood of fertilised eggs, and it is easy to understand that chicken coops can thus become battlefields. It is understood so clearly that even an Italian writer coined the expression ‘Two cocks in a henhouse are not good (C. Goldoni) too many cooks in the kitchen’.
Then, after 1945, with the advent of modern selection, the poultry industry began a revolutionary transformation by selecting ‘specialised breeds’.
Those breeds with more ‘meat’ attitude are the basis for crosses that generate animals that gradually, year after year and at the expense of egg production, grow faster and more efficiently. In modern meat breeds, broilers always reach commercial weights before puberty, castration is therefore not necessary and is no longer practised
In contrast, cross-breeds have been developed from the breeds with the most ‘egg’ attitude, which, giving up to meat production, now produce far more eggs than in the past and more efficiently. Unfortunately, the males of modern laying breeds grow even less efficiently than in the past, so these animals are never used to become broilers. Instead, male chicks of laying breeds are used for two niche markets: free-range chickens and capons. Growth cycles of 4 months are foreseen for the former and 6 months for the latter. Such long growth cycles are not suitable for broilers, which would become too heavy, whereas they are very suitable for male laying hens. Unfortunately, production costs are very high (three times that of normal chickens) and consumers only consume about 20 % of the males of laying breeds that are born.
Capons are only in demand and consumed at Christmas time and only in Southern Europe. In the rest of Europe, free-range cockerels are more common, but even so they have very low market shares. The rest of the male chicks of laying breeds, on the other hand, are discarded legally and painlessly.
In recent years, public opinion has begun to regard the killing of these chicks as unacceptable. However, the poultry industry has developed various technologies enabling the sex of the embryo to be identified directly in the egg (whereby the male is discarded at a stage of life when it is not yet capable of feeling stress and pain), which are being applied throughout Europe (https://moreaboutchicken.com/the-new-frontier-to-avoid-male-chick-culling-in-ovo-sexing-using-magnetic-resonance-imaging-and-artificial-intelligence/). The use for capons and cockerels already makes it possible to have 20% of laying hens (therefore eggs for consumption) that can bear the title ‘obtained without killing male chicks‘.
The price of the technologies enabling this innovation is very high and it is estimated that it will triple the cost of 1-day-old hens (i.e. female chicks generated from selected hens and which will therefore themselves be selected hens) which, simplifying a little, will rise from 1 to 3€ (to be multiplied by the thousands of hens a farmer buys). However, this cost will be spread over the number of eggs produced by each laying hen and represents a price increase of only 0.6 euro cents per egg for consumption.
The editorial staff of M.A.C.
