They don't process and sell culled birds. At large scale when culling due to disease, they generally turn off the ventilation system and suffocate the birds en masse.

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"Culling" is different than "slaughter for meat"

Layers aren’t viable as a meat crop anyway, you’d spend more trying to engineer some one-off effort like that than you’d make and nobody would want the resulting meat. Your competition is freakish mutant birds that get so big in a few weeks that if you don’t butcher them they’ll soon be unable to walk and start to suffocate under their own bulk, and that taste like the almost nothing that grocery store buyers expect.

I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food, but I kinda doubt they do even that with a disease-cull.

Layers do still make good meat birds, not sure why you're assuming they aren't. I'd usually use a layer for soup, but I wouldn't waste the meat if I had to take the bird for some reason.

Cornish cross birds are likely the "freakish mutant birds" you're talking about. People bred them to grow as fast as possible, seems wrong to call them freakish since we wanted them that way. Its around 8 weeks old when they can't walk, that's the point where they have to be processed.

I wouldn't recommend feeding chickens back to the flock. Chickens will eat other chickens, but you need to be really careful with regards to the cause of death. I recommend anyone raising chickens also raises hogs, if you do lose a bird the hogs will east it and there aren't many illnesses that can cross between those species.

>I assume egg layers are typically either fed back to the flock (chickens love eating chicken) or turned into e.g. dog food

or mcnuggets, or any sort of processed chicken product where the taste of the chicken is drowned out.