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Chicken Sexing and Knowing
- Aromasin 3y agoRelated to this, I had been dreaming up an idea for a start-up for a while that uses computer imaging techniques to do non-invasive in-ovo sexing of bird eggs for the poultry industry. It seems criminal that we gas or drop into a macerator over half of the chickens hatched. It's just so cruel and seems like it could be done at an embryonic stage where they don't yet have the capacity for pain or sentience. Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classification-sorting/ https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati... This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.
- DanielleMolloy 3y agoInteresting, thanks for sharing. I do wonder to what extent the MRI magnet poses a safety risk? Also these things are quite expensive, I wonder how the producers view the costs involved. I wonder whether fNIRS could be a cheaper and safer alternative. (Obviously, such a system is a good development.)
- drkevorkian 3y agoThe ones dropped into the macerator are the lucky ones. The ones who live suffer for their short lives, until their economic utility curve crosses a threshold value and they are also slaughtered.
- Aromasin 3y agoI wouldn't say lucky - I'd rather go through the rest of life suffering than die at this moment, as there is a joy to be found in that itself - but I understand your sentiments. Very few would choose not being born over life, as you can't predict how life will be, even for these chickens. The chickens that live in my neighbour's garden had a horrible 2 years of life in cages, followed by a great 10 or so. Reducing pain and suffering is better than not doing anything at all, and it's childish to assume that we can do anything more than regulate our food habits, and perhaps a couple of those around us. I'm vegan; I'm not deluded enough to think that my eating habits are anywhere near mainstream. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight for animal agriculture, whatever my personal feelings may be about that, so the next best thing one can do is reduce suffering where possible, and in-ovo sexing in hatcheries works a small way towards that.
- lonelyasacloud 3y ago> Very few would choose not being born over life ... Err, Moksha, or something like it is pretty much the goal of a number of religions practised by a significant chunk of the planet.
- lupire 3y agoThat's quite different. Not getting to be born again (which by the way no one actually knows what that means) is different from not being born at all in the first place. Of course the original premise is impossible, because no one knows how be unborn either.
- sudden_dystopia 3y agoI under that factory farming is absolutely ugly and there is a lot of low hanging fruit in how to improve it. But I never understand the extremist philosophy that no one should eat chickens or raise them in their back yard for eggs. Chickens simply don’t exist in the wild and are very far removed from the jungle fowl from which they came so long ago. If we stopped eating and raising them, they would go extinct. Is it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely?
- lupire 3y agoHow much suffering are you comfortable imposing upon others for your own aesthetic satisfaction? If no one is willing to do something humanely, then no one deserves to have it. It's not a complicated analysis.
- em-bee 3y agoIs it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely? if those are the two choices, then i'd prefer the later. but isn't there a third choice? to raise chicken in good conditions? i suppose maybe that doing so would reduce the amount of chicken we can consume, and also raise the price, but i think that is preferable to letting them suffer.
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- dekleinewolf 3y agoAnd that's not the only one :). The company I work at worked on this one: https://inovo.nl/ https://inovo.nl/
- Aromasin 3y agoAwesome. I only mentioned that one because it looked to be the only one that was non-invasive. It looks like you managed to get an invasive method to scale though, which is great.
- verisimi 3y agoYes, I absolutely agree that it is better to do this than dropping half the chicks into a macerator. What is amazing to me, is that this is using MRI, which is a very expensive technology. Eg simple scans are very expensive for a consumer. But here, following your link, the MRI tech is in use, capable of acting 24000 eggs an hour, and can check not just for sex, but also for cracks in the shell, air sack placement, etc.
- fbn79 3y agoThe whole poultry industry is insane and "criminal". If eggs costs just 2$ and McChicken less than 2$, and company still profits you cannot expect an ethic industry.
- lynx23 3y agoIf you are ajust a little bit critical and realistic with human endeavors, you should see that ethic industry is an outright oxymoron. Capitalism and Ethics are fundamentally exclusive. Whenever they claim otherwise, it is propaganda.
- ben_w 3y agoIf you imagine the space of possible things we can do, the vector marked "make as much money as possible" isn't perfectly parallel with how most people would draw the one marked "be as ethical as possible"[0]. But the entire reason capitalism happened was that 248 years ago some Scottish dude noticed that, quite often, they're pointing in similar directions. Adam Smith didn't phrase it like that, and many people have mistaken "similar" for "identical" when this is absolutely not so (we also didn't have a deep understanding of what's now called Goodhart's law until much later), but it has made a huge difference to the quality of life of many people despite the things it does wrong. Also don't forget that we don't, and never have, lived in a pure free market, and that governments can and do pass laws to restrict what business are permitted to do — lots of money to be made in selling cocaine and heroin, both used to be sold as cough medicine, and then the law changed. [0] phrased weirdly because most people disagree about how to draw the "ethics" vector, too.
- lynx23 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
- ben_w 3y agoHow is that supposed to support your claim that "ethic industry is an outright oxymoron. Capitalism and Ethics are fundamentally exclusive"? Even one example of correlation between two things is sufficient to disprove any claim that those two things are exclusive.
- _nalply 3y agoMany years ago I met someone who only eats egg whites. I watched him pouring yolks into the drain. I asked, why do you do that? He answered, because yolks contain unhealthy fats. Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better. We discard half of all hatched chicks. I eat eggs. I decided to accept that ugly fact. If you don't, stop eating eggs and poultry. Or raise your own chickens. Anything else is hypocrisy. At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals. Technology can help. Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot. Usually when I am buying or eating eggs it is easy for me to not think about discarded male chicks. Then I pray for forgiveness. I prefer to buy eggs where the label says they are from free-range chickens, however.
- seszett 3y ago> Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot. Killing male chicks after birth has been forbidden in France since 2022 though, eggs must be sorted before birth. Moral outrage is supposed to turn into law and then it has to be done, economical or not. It can work, not everything has to be seen through the lens of money.
- gambiting 3y ago>>eggs must be sorted before birth. How does that work then? Do we already have technology to do this?
- boomboomsubban 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
- seabass-labrax 3y agoThe Circuit uses a laser to create a tiny hole of 0.3 mm (0.01 in) in the shell of all fertilized hatching eggs. A minimal amount of allantoic fluid is then extracted from the hatching eggs and placed into an external marker. From https://www.respeggt.com/technology/ https://www.respeggt.com/technology/. According to their own site, they are a for-profit organisation incorporated in Köln, are focused on humane poultry and appear to have invented this technology.
- gumby 3y agoThe TL;DR insight is a good one: if NNs are trained on the concensus status quo, they will generate the OK results, not the effective or outstanding ones. The author is I guess in product marketing and says that this result should be encouraging. They point out that simply benchmarking your efforts against the competition also gets you just to the consensus status quo. There’s also an amusing subtle shout-out in the opening chick sexing hook: people (correctly) complain that we can’t look into NNs to explain their inner working; the author points out that many skilled people can’t explain their decision making either.
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- thrdbndndn 3y agoCan someone provide/find the Japanese name of "Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School"? I'm curious about it and want to find some primary sources, but I can't even find the name. I'm not saying it's bullshit by the way; I'm fairly familiar with Japanese, after reading https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%AF%E3%83%88%E3%83%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%83%92%E3%83%8A%E3%81%AE%E9%9B%8C%E9%9B%84%E9%91%91%E5%88%A5 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%AF%E3%83%88%E3... it looks to me that indeed so-called "Vent sexing" was discovered by Japanese in 1920s (the exact year isn't very consistent, Wikipedia says it was 1924 for Japanese version and 1933 for English version; while this article says 1927). But I can't find any mention about a school. I tried to search "全日本 初生雛鑑別" with various words of "School" in Japanese but find nothing.
- readthenotes1 3y agoI just heard about chicken sexing in an episode of _White Collar_. Since it's something the con man told us I'm not sure how much truth there is in it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsnowdin 3y agoWith my limited Japanese, the closest thing I could find to a school had the name '初生雛鑑別師養成所' mentioned in an article https://www.tsuushinsei.net/shikaku-hiroba/animal/24917 https://www.tsuushinsei.net/shikaku-hiroba/animal/24917
- thrdbndndn 3y agoThanks, that looks like it!
- j16sdiz 3y agoThe best I could find is the (video, japanese) documentary here: https://jpn-psa.jp/video/ https://jpn-psa.jp/video/
- yieldcrv 3y agoThis is an article about subjective artistic taste and how its not subjective at all all can be quantified and everything else is a convenient lie. our inability to quantify something is a deficiency we have in our data processing abilities.
- zokier 3y agoThe pg quote is interesting, I strongly disagree with this part > But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. That would be only true if as a designer your job is to make things as beautiful as possible, or aligned with your own taste. But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately. > If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it. Which then goes to the other large part of professional design; its one thing to have some "taste" or be able to evaluate a design, and another thing to actually create/implement/change a design. Indeed that is the big thing of professionalism in general, not just being able to imagine some ideal solution, but to understand what is implementable with the real-world constraints which include your own skills and/or time-budget. There is this common division of hobbyists vs professionals and its often implied that professionals can do things better. But to me the big distinction between the two is that professionals can do things on a budget and on the spot, while hobbyists can pour endless hours for their passion projects. With that perspective its not surprising that hobbyists can accomplish better results in many cases.
- Jensson 3y ago> But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately. Design where intent doesn't align looks very ugly to me, so that is still a feeling. Things feel right when designed well.
- adamnemecek 3y agoI have seen this fact referenced many times at this point. You should look up what happens to the male chicks, it’s some of the most fucked up shit you can imagine. Search for “male chicks” on YouTube.
- grugagag 3y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=udSiluTAOaQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=udSiluTAOaQ
- adamnemecek 3y agoI intentionally didn’t post a direct link.
- alexpotato 3y agoI'm surprised that this article left out how the training of the chick sexers actually happened. Apparently it was: - trainee picks up a chick and looks at the rear end - they say "male" or "female" - the instructor is standing behind them but offset so they can look over the should of trainee and still see the chick - the instructor says either "correct" or "incorrect" - this goes on until the trainee hits some level of accuracy The thought here is that this is building a subconscious (some might say "zen like") ability to determine the sex. This is also why the successful trainees can't explain how it works: they weren't give explicit instructions to build a mental framework. Some other examples of this: People who learn a language organically at home vs in school. E.g. it's easy for me to translate Spanish to English b/c I learned it in high school. It's harder for me to translate Italian to English b/c I learned Italian organically and not via vocabulary mapping and class instruction. Another example is the egg sushi scene from Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The junior chef just makes egg sushi every day until Jiro one day says "good".
- em-bee 3y agoso they are trained like an AI but i get the point. when cooking myself, it often goes the same way. even for things as simple as pancakes. when a recipe says that the dough should have a certain consistency, that is almost meaningless to me. i have to try a few times and see how the pancakes turned out. and after trying enough, i just get a feel for it, but i still could not explain to you how it's done.
- Razengan 3y agoAlso see culling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling How do practices like that not make everyone infuriated at the meat industry
- _heimdall 3y agoThere are a few comments here related to how unethical the chicken industry is. Other animal production is just as bad, cows are treated terribly whether they're being raised for meat is dairy. If you are one who believes plants may have feelings or that the fungal network is actually used as communication between plants, the concerns would spread to them as industrial farming treats plants just as badly. I wish more people would go out of their way to buy from local farmers, and that the government would get out of the way with regulations so that it could be a more viable business. Its nearly impossible to start and run a profitable small farm today, and when production goes to an industrial scale all concern for the animals' (and plants') well being is lost. Everything is boiled down to numbers in a spreadsheet and producers rarely even interact with the animals at all, of course they won't care for an individual animal's well being.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoSmall farms aren’t great for the environment per kg food, and suffer the last mile delivery problem where the lion’s share of of the delivery pollution occurs just as badly if not worse than large overseas farms. You’re romanticizing a past that is long gone.
- _heimdall 3y agoI'm not sure where you got this data from, but small farms don't all operate the same way and can't be generalized to a simple metric of "environmental impact per kg of food". Massive farms get away with externalizing a large portion of their environmental impact. Does your data account for the impact of everything from fertilizer production and transportation to chemical use and ecological damage of pesticides and fertilizers? How is the environmental damage for the massive amount of soil loss with industrial farming even accounted for? > You’re romanticizing a past that is long gone. I'm not romanticizing anything and to assume that belittles the point. I agree that we don't have many small farms today and I was raising that as a problem, not a bygone era that we're better off without. Your assumption that I'm romanticizing it because we disagree in the feasibility or benefits is like me claiming that emissions controls will reverse climate change is a romanticized view, and implying that its a waste of time. I don't agree with anyone that thinks emissions controls will save the planet, but I wouldn't disrespect their ideas for a different future either.
- sudden_dystopia 3y agoThere are certain “sex linked” breeds of chickens that it is obvious whether a new born chick is male or female as they will be either color a or color b. We raise chickens for eggs and got stuck with a couple roosters before we decided to only purchase sex linked chicks going forward.
- lupire 3y agoNot very useful. Need sex-linked eggs.