10 ms·
The Lucrative Art of Chicken Sexing (2017)
- Falling3 9y agoI've worked with chickens for years. Among lay people, being able to correctly sex a chicken after 2-3 weeks is a difficult skill. It's incredibly interesting that these people are able to do it so easily at such an early age. It's also put to very disturbing uses. The females go on to be used as layer hens and the males are kill within hours of hatching - generally in gruesome/painful ways.
- gambiting 9y agoI thought the males were just thrown into the mincer, dying within the instant they hit the blades? It looks gruesome, but I would hardly call it painful.
- jjtheblunt 9y agoshameful of humans
- DonaldFisk 9y agoHow can you tell? It sounds pretty painful. There is a painless way of killing, through asphyxiation by inert gas (e.g. nitrogen, but not carbon dioxide).
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoGoogling suggests that animal welfare organisations currently suggest maceration is the best alternative, being better than carbon dioxide which gets second place. Do you happen to know why they don't promote your suggestion of suffucation with nitrogen?
- DonaldFisk 9y agoI can't speak for animal welfare organizations. Maceration is quicker than CO2 asphyxiation. Animals (including humans) can detect high levels of CO2 but most (rodents are an exception) can't detect low levels of oxygen. I found these articles: https://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/report.html https://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/report.html (scroll down to Gas Stunning). https://www.hsa.org.uk/downloads/technical-notes/TN12-gas-killing-of-chickens-and-turkeys.pdf https://www.hsa.org.uk/downloads/technical-notes/TN12-gas-ki... Both recommend inert gas asphyxiation but in the context of adult birds. Scientists are looking into in ovo sexing: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-016-0116-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-016-0116-6
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoYeah given the extremely robust panic response induced by co2-- to the point where co2 is used as an animal model of panic-- almost any other gas is better.
- wnkrshm 9y agoExactly, that feeling of asphyxiation you get when you hold your breath is not because of low oxygen levels - your body doesn't know about those - but high CO2 concentration.
- gambiting 9y agoI don't know what part of dying instantly would be painful - that's sort of the point of the "instantly" part. If you watch a video of this process on YouTube it's incredibly quick.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoFast pain receptors send signals to the brain at a speed of between 5 and 30 metres per second (via A-delta fibres). So if the pain travels a distance of 1cm, it wil reach the brain in between 0.3 and 2 milliseconds. If the killing process lasts any longer than this, it probably generates excruciating pain, albeit briefly.
- gowld 9y agoIt's a metaphysical question. How long did it take you to consciously feel pain the last time you accidentally touched a burning stove?
- toast0 9y agoIs it more disturbing to kill the males on the day they hatch or weeks later?
- Falling3 9y agoTaking away their life before they've had any opportunity to experience it is fairly disturbing. But it really depends on what their life looks like for those few weeks.
- passiveincomelg 9y agoBeing shredded alive sucks, but even worse is the permanent torture the hens have to endure until they die.
- eric_the_read 9y agoI cannot for the life of me remember the context, but I remember reading about skills that can't be taught; only learned; chicken-sexing was one of these.
- bayesian_horse 9y agoIt's "taught" only in the sense that an expert sexer sexes a couple hundred chicks and then the students get the same ones.
- maroonblazer 9y agoYeah, I recall reading about one that had something to do with watchmen in London/Britain during WWII being able to spot German fighters in the air...? The best way they found to train them was to simply have them watch experienced ones do it for some period of time.
- zawerf 9y agoDo you remember the list of other skills? I think it's kind of like teaching someone how to ride a bike. No amount of theory and coaching will help until the connections form in their brain. Smarter everyday has an interesting video[1] on this phenomenon where he showed that it takes considerable effort to learn to ride a "backward" bike and once you do, you will forget how to ride a normal one and need to relearn it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
- Doxin 9y agoNote that he didn't entirely forget how to ride a normal bike, It only took him a couple tries for his brain to switch the normal-bike-riding-program back on.
- presidentender 9y agoGruesome, but I would dispute painful. The present state of things is the least bad it could be while still allowing us to enjoy the prices we do.
- ballenf 9y ago> The present state of things is the least bad it could be while still allowing us to enjoy the prices we do. That statement belongs in a dystopian sci-fi novel.
- mordrax 9y agoWelcome... to the real world.
- fenwick67 9y agoApt Bojack Horseman quote incoming... > How do you respond to allegations that factory farming is "torture" or "cruel" or "like a terrifying movie about some strange dystopian society, but in this monster story, the horrifying monsters are us"? > Relax, Tommy, everything we do is completely legal and FDA-approved, so, therefore, it is fine. > I have no follow-up questions
- groby_b 9y agoI'm not sure how you tie levels of pain to prices for eggs. (And I'd strongly dispute that being ground up isn't painful. Call it a hunch) On the upside, there's research on in-egg sexing.
- Daishiman 9y agoWithout trying to sound cruel, the industrial grinders used for chickens are extremely fast and might act faster than the temporary threshold needed for the pain to be consciously perceived.
- Falling3 9y agoI'm not sure what the breakdown of different methods is, but gassing is common as well as simply dumping them into a bin and letting them suffocate each other.
- kgc 9y agoWhy not grow the males to be for eating?
- fenwick67 9y agoRoosters don't lay eggs, and somebody did the math and figured out the return on hens vs roosters is so much better it's not even worth raising the roosters.
- Falling3 9y agoRoosters are raised for meat - just a different breed from those raised to lay eggs.
- golem14 9y agoNot what I heard. I am led to believe the males are essentially shredded alive. http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2016/06/13/us-egg-producers-to-eliminate-routine-killing-male-chicks-by-2020.html http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2016/06/13/us-egg-producer...
- bg4 9y agoHas anyone done the math recently or is it industry dogma?
- newnewpdro 9y agoCapon is tasty though.
- bayesian_horse 9y agoIt depends on the jurisdiction, but the chicks are usually dispatched in a way that minimizes suffering, even if it looks gruesome. The flipside to their early death is the fate of the hens, which may have to live in small cages for a couple of month before being slaughtered themselves.
- passiveincomelg 9y agoCan you really watch a video of adorable little chicks being shredded and think "yeah, this is fine"?
- mieseratte 9y agoLife is full of the most horrible pain and suffering you can't imagine. We can't stop and shed a tear every time someone meets their fate, let alone every time some poor creature does. So, yes, I can absolutely watch those videos without a shred of emotion. It's called compartmentalization.
- passiveincomelg 9y agoThat's certainly true and I do this with suffering I feel unable to do anything about. But in the case of factory farming, I decided that it is insane and I don't want anything to do with it. However, it's not just that I feel bad about animals being killed or tortured. Factory farming is also simply disgusting and I don't want to eat the food it produces.
- gowld 9y agoI'm confused; you seem to be saying that inflicting horrible pain and suffering on any person or creature should not give anyone pause. Really?
- mieseratte 9y agoCan I do anything to stop it? No Do I know anyone who could do something to stop it? No Is it someone I hold near and dear? No Compartmentalize.
- cyberferret 9y agoI watched a video once of one of these workers picking chicks out of a conveyor belt - the female ones were dropped back onto the belt, but the male ones were wrist flicked into an eviscerating machine. Pretty much turned me off the whole poultry industry at that point. I can't imagine the sort of callous nature one has to foment within themselves to so dismissively handle a living creature then toss it into a machine that will instantly end its life in seconds, for no better reason than being born the wrong sex. I can accept killing as part of the food cycle, but this cold method of one person stamping out hundreds of lives per hour for no real productive gain had me reeling.
- phil21 9y ago> no real productive gain Hmm? I grew up around farms. You do realize roosters (male chickens) are not very productive right? I think these practices are horrible, but I understand that the only reason they happen is due to the productive gain. Even on traditional farms roosters are culled earlier than later, as you only need a handful at most per 100 chickens. The type of operation you describe is typically for laying hens. Roosters of those breeds are not useful.
- gowld 9y agoIs the hypocrisy of outsourcing your killing somehow better than callously doing the killing yourself?
- lbstr_ftw 9y ago"The Lucrative Art of [Grinding Babies Alive]"
- golergka 9y agoThis whole thing just sounds like a dream for ML. Have anyone tried it yet?
- kiddico 9y agoYou send some images to an API endpoint, and we send you back a determination of m/f. Sexing as a Service, SaaS?
- knicholes 9y agoIsn't there already an app for this on Silicon Valley and subsequently real life? "Not Hotdog"
- drpgq 9y agoYeah I work at a face recognition company and have done a lot of work with sex classifiers and I'm pretty curious.
- bayesian_horse 9y agoI've thought about that, and in short, the problem would be acquiring the data in the first place. In the fully automated case, a machine would have to pick up the chick, turn it the right way, pop the vent, and release it, all without killing it. A rather complicated task for robotics, and this could get very error prone or very maintenance intensive. Next way would be to have a Human put the chick over a scanner in the right orientation. This solution is less attractive, because you still need to pay a worker, and that worker would only have to learn the sexing skill for a few weeks to be equally as fast as the machine...
- NedIsakoff 9y ago"Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School" -- awesome band name, if I were to name it after myself it would be the "Wang Chick Sexting School"
- Reason077 9y agoAs the saying goes, if you want to make an omelette, you have to sex a lot of chickens.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoThe quality is bad, but Mike Rowe and his Dirty Jobs show highlighted Chicken Sexers if you want to see more of what it entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTddabBi5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gTddabBi5A
- burnte 9y agoI was about to post the same link because of this passage in the article: "When I asked Pam Freeman, editor of a poultry magazine, to introduce me to a chicken sexer, she said, "I honestly don't know anyone who has met a chicken sexer."
- jacobkg 9y agoChicken Sexing = Identifying a Chicken as Male or Female
- Simon_says 9y agoThanks for the clarification.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- devit 9y agoAny progress on genetically engineering chicken so that only female chicks are produced, or even better artificially producing eggs without any chickens at all?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_link At least they color female chicks a different color.
- nick238 9y agoPut a fluorescent protein in the W chromosome that's expressed in the embryo, then you could look for the tell-tale color and destroy the others earlier.
- saalweachter 9y agoThis may actually be more difficult for chickens. Chickens use the ZW sex chromosomes, and females are ZW while males are ZZ. This means, among other things, that it is the female germ cell which determines the sex of the offspring, by contributing either a Z or a W. My understanding is that with mammals, you can centrifuge sperm to (more-or-less) separate "X" and "Y" sperm, changing the odds of conception in the direction you choose; even if you found it economical to go this route with chickens, you wouldn't have the option, because all the chicken sperm is "Z".
- bayesian_horse 9y agoYou could inject the hen with a CRISPR vector introducing a mutation into the Z chromosome which would be letal to eggs. Then put a saving gene on the W chromosome. Or a letal mutation on the W chromosome, to select for male broilers. And no, it's not centrifugation. The DNA in the chromosomes is stained, then a cell sorter with a laser determines which ones have more or less chromatin (the Y is missing an arm vs X).
- daveguy 9y agoIf it is such a gestalt, not explainable function. I am almost certain it isn't just visual. It would be interesting to see the level of accuracy with just video of the vent exposure. Even more so, just an image. The article states the sexers accidentally kill some chicks at first when learning because of the force required to expose the vents. The force required could provide some clue. The way the vent moves under some manipulations could make a difference. I would rather the whole thing be solved with ultrasonic or some other imaging well before hatching.
- rkagerer 9y agoIndeed. If they were able to maintain accuracy using images, that sounds like it would be a perfect candidate for experimenting with machine learning (using the tagged images).
- bayesian_horse 9y agoIf it were so easy as to use ultrasound, people would do that already. The resolution of ultrasound, even at that little distance, is pretty bad. I doubt if the reproductive organs are big enough at that age. If I remember correctly, they don't differ that much at this stage either.
- shaki-dora 9y agoI once attended a lecture where a law professor used chicken sexing as a metaphor for jurisprudence. It’s surprisingly apt.
- zhte415 9y agoWhat was the argument of the metaphor?
- petermcneeley 9y agoIs sperm sex selection not possible? (it is in humans) Is this detectable via ultrasound of egg? Why not breed chickens with visible sex difference?
- djrogers 9y agoSperm selection ain’t possible with chickens, because all sperm is the same chromosome. The females provide the variant chromosome to determine sex, unlike mammals.
- bayesian_horse 9y agoIt would also be impractical because you need too much sperm to inseminate chickens, in terms of producing profit. In cattle, this is a lot easier, because bull semen can be diluted quite heavily and still produce viable offspring.
- viggity 9y agoelsewhere in the discussion it said that chickens have a ZW chromosome system. females are ZW, males are ZZ. so I guess the answer to your question is "no". as far as breeding something more noticeable is probably possible, the problem is when you find that trait and breed it into the variety, do you bring down the productivity of the variety. Is a 2% reduction in productivity of the chicken (over the course of its life) pay for the 3-4 seconds it takes for a chicken sexer to make a decision? Even if the sexer makes $60k/year and it takes them 4 seconds to make a decision, it only costs 3 cents to make a decision. There are a whole bunch of other considerations (life of avg layer, input costs per egg, etc). I don't know the answer, but is all that worth the risk that the productivity takes a 5% or 10% hit instead of 2%.
- swebs 9y agoFunny, because the How It's Made documentary shows them easily being separated by checking two rows of feathers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVf6KXVIZ5I&t=197s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVf6KXVIZ5I&t=197s
- bayesian_horse 9y agoThere are special breeds of chicken, where there is a gene on a sex chromosome, whose effect is visible in the chick. Now, with CRISPR and genetic engineering, it may become possible one day to sex them at the egg stage by expressing a simple gene. A tiny biopsy, similar to in ovo vaccination, would reveal the sex. But the consumers don't like genetic engineering...
- jedimastert 9y agoThe casual-ness of those workers just chucking baby chicks into shoots weirds me out quite a bit. Like, I'm sure they're fine, but it's just so weird.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoWhen you handle thousands of then every single day, you probably tend to disassociate from the individual chicks.
- drumttocs8 9y agoSee the book on memory: Moonwalking with Einstein
- julienfr112 9y agoWhat about deep learning ? Did anyone try this ? Camera + Tensorflow + big dataset of photos ?