95%, which could possibly be upgraded to 99% in the short term. Its method of retrieving some fluid from the fertilised egg with a needle, and finding the biomarker sabineamine in this sample with mass spectrometry, takes less than one second to perform. In late May 2021, a research team from the Technische Hochschule OWL based in Lemgo, Germany, claimed to be able to shine a laser into a small hole in fertilised eggs’ scale, and derive its sex from the reflected light using fluorescence spectroscopy within six days, thus complying to Germany's legal requirement of early sexing from 2024. Startups including Respeggt and In Ovo responded skeptically, saying the publication of these conclusions seemed rushed, and that "many methods may seem promising at first, but aren't immediately useful in practice." Legal challenge in Germany (2013–2019) In 2013, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia issued a decree banning hatcheries from killing chicks, against which two egg hatcheries in the state appealed. As paragraph one of Germany's Animal Welfare Act stipulates that "No-one shall inflict pain, suffering or harm on an animal without a reasonable cause," a lower court ruled that killing for food production was a "reasonable" ground. This led to a challenge in the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. On 13 June 2019, this court decided that the current way of culling chicks "violates the country's laws against killing animals without a justifiable reason." However, the court allowed hatcheries to keep culling chicks on a temporary basis until alternatives, such as sex determination in eggs, are introduced. Such "no-kill eggs" had been introduced into the German market in 2018 and were available in more than 200 shops by June 2019, but there was no industrial-scale solution available yet. Political efforts (2019–present) In response to the June 2019 Leipzig court ruling, German Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner stated chick culling was "ethically unacceptable" and argued it should be prohibited. The Grand Coalition agreement of March 2018 stated that chick culling should have been ended "by the middle of the current legislative period", which would have been in October 2019, but this goal was not met. At that time, gassing was the most common method of chick culling in Germany, which killed up to 50 million chicks a year. Although the federal government had already invested millions of euros in stimulating scientific research into two alternative methods for sex determination in eggs