this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Purely economically, males are useful only for fertilization. Males can’t produce milk or eggs, so better to just kill them young and sell their meat as a delicacy. Farmers gather sperm and do artificial insemination.
also, they can be more aggressive, especially if there's more than one of them in a group. easier to slaughter the ones you dont want to breed from.
or castrate them. hence oxen, geldings, etc, for male animals that have a use beyond being a sperm factory.
oh yeah, and you dont technically need a lot of males to keep population numbers up, because sperm is incredibly cheap compared to the investment required from female animals
Also roosters would kill each other in the cages we make chickens live in. Plus their meat isn't as good.
There's gotta be someone whose written about how the material conditions of animal husbandry were repurposed as an ideological tool to control human women.
the existence of males is only tolerated because nobody's come up with a better way to keep a large variation of genes in the same population. even so, many species have tried to rope males in to do at least some of the job of raising offspring (apart from spraying essentially free sperm).
humans are one of these species, but it's ... uh.. it's going about as well as you can see.