8 ms·

Related 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 f

Related 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 ago
Interesting, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      That'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 ago
    I 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 ago
      How 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 ago
      Is 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.
    - 3y ago
dekleinewolf 3y ago
And that's not the only one :). The company I work at worked on this one: https://inovo.nl/ https://inovo.nl/
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Awesome. 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    If 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 ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
      - ben_w 3y ago
        How 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 ago
Many 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 ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
    - seabass-labrax 3y ago
      The 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.

DanielleMolloy 3y ago

Interesting, 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 ago

The 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 ago
I 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 ago
    That'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 ago
  I 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 ago
    How 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 ago
    Is 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.
  - 3y ago

dekleinewolf 3y ago

And that's not the only one :). The company I work at worked on this one: https://inovo.nl/ https://inovo.nl/

Aromasin 3y ago
Awesome. 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 ago

Yes, 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 ago

The 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 ago
If 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 ago
  If 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 ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
    - ben_w 3y ago
      How 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 ago

Many 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 ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-ovo_sexing
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    The 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.