The Insanely Lucrative and Psychological Job of Chick Sexing

Discover the fascinating world of chick sexing—an essential yet highly specialized skill that keeps the poultry industry thriving. Learn how this practice transformed modern farming and why it's so vital today.

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[watsonwrote]

8:00 This phenomenon also reminds me of professional Geoguessers. They can glance an image from Google maps for a fraction of a second, even scrambled, and say the name of the country instantly. They'll say things like, "this feels like Mongolian grass" and "these trees seem Italian" and they are correct, but can't usually articulate why they know this immediately. They've just been exposed to these images so often, the patterns have been impressed on them like how we train AI models.

[TerenceClark]

I worked in a tool and die shop that made cutting taps for a summer in high school. I was general shop help, and QA was a big part of the job. By a few weeks in I could visually tell when there were .001 inch aberrations in the cutting threads based on subtle macroscopic properties I was trained to look for. We confirmed with precision tools under magnification, but the QA people were the first line of defense when it came to possibly identifying worn tool heads or bad machine calibration. It's downright bizarre what humans can become good at with practice.

[michelleduncombe]

I just wish the industry was run by local farmers, not corporations. I visited a beef farm for Farm Day, which was a day where city families were matched with country families and you could experience a day on a farm. I told the farmer that we would buy a whole cow from him and use a large freezer to store it, because I want to buy fresh from the farm. He said unfortunately he can’t do that because all the livestock has to go to an abattoir run by a corporation. Always the same story - farmers get ripped off, corporations make shittonnes. I live in Australia. It’s hard to source local produce that it is not under the control of greedy corporations but it can be done (at a price, which I am willing to pay).

[MuchPurple]

Keeping chickens in the city was a big fad about 15 years ago. In Seattle, the local laws allowed more hens to those with larger yards, and those with huge yards could even Keep other farm animals. I suspect that law dated back many years. I had a lot of space, and ordered by mail 25 sexed day old chicks. They did well, but one did indeed turn out to be a rooster. He actually bonded with me, so it was sad when I had to give him away. Roosters werent allowed. I later learned that others in my area went to great lengths to hide their rooster pets.

[margotrosendorn]

"Ok when's he gonna bring up chick maceration...oh, there it is..."

[johnjamieson]

Dad had a hatchery in Englewood Colorado (south side of Denver). This was maybe 1947 to 1968. It was called Jamieson and son's hatchery. Did hatch and deliver Hyline chickens. As a child, I remember seeing Japanese Chicken Sexers working there, these were about the only Japanese people I remember seeing in those days. As I remember it Dad purchased houses for them and they were well paid. They typically worked in a darkened room with a bare light bulb over their table. To reduce eye strain they wore tennis visors with a green transparent visor. Looked like a couple of guys playing poker or something. They were extremely fast and good. Dad said they were about 98% accurate as his customers would typically get 2 roosters per box of 100. They would pack a box of 100 with 104 chicks, to allow for the 2 roosters and 2 deaths. Everything here seems quite accurate to me. Roosters were used as hog feed.

[jpablo]

Sweet! It works. Jumped over here from your community post response to show some support. Keep up the fantastic work!

[Falcon-ehtq]

I worked in a Maple Leaf Food Chicken hatchery in Ontario. Moved 780, 000 birds before noon. Sometimes 1.1m. EACH DAY. It's a minimum wage job here, and was my first job, very very dirty job and you see some things you would not want to. Like birds being eviscerated accidentally ect. And someone new to it would be lucky to hit 800/hr even with wing sexing. There was one person who would get over 1000/hr reliably, she would ambidextrously use both hands to sex a bird in each hand only picking it up by the wing where inexperienced people would start with picking up the bird, spread the wing ect..

[redmiata]

When I was a tank crewman, we were trained to identify different military vehicles, both friendly and not, with only a quick glimps of the vehicle. If you mis-identify a friendly vehicle you fail the test.

[y-not]

When I was a kid my parents owned a pet shop and used to sell bags of 50 frozen dead day old chicks for Birds of prey etc. (I believe they are electrocuted on a wire grid.)
Apparently me making some stand up in a diorama for Easter 🐥🐤🐣 was not a suitable thing to do in a pet shop frequented by animal lovers 😬 🤷‍♂

[no_nameyouknow]

It's like how you can recognize a song you are familiar with from a split second of sound. We make a rapid determination based on very subtle information but even so when you know it's not even a guess, it's a certainty.
It seems so natural and easy, but if you break it down you are recognizing something quite complex from a very tiny but dense set of information. Similar to this 'sexing' process. Just a lot more mundane because we all have songs that we can recognize this way.

[blackdandelion]

Poultry Owner and shower here. It's a strange skill because you have to squeeze them tightly, but gently in order to have them expel their both poo and pee, as it all comes out of the cloaca, so that you can attempt to properly sex a chick. I know you listed the rates as high as 98% accuracy, but for major poultry breeders who put out yearly catalogs and all we in the industry know to never expect more than a 90% accuracy for any breed and depending on the facility you purchase from sometimes the sexing can drop below 90%.
It's really that the cornish crosses are what is grown to be the big chickens people see in the super markets and believe a chicken looks like. The majority of breeds of chickens do not look like, function like, or put on weight like a cornish cross and it has been traditional for hundreds of years that you had straight run (whatever hatched be it boys and girls) and then the best of the males was kept for breeding purposes and protection of the hens and the rest went to "freezer camp". Old hens that were not suitable to lay anymore would go to freezer camp as their production becomes so low with age that it is not worth the cost of the feed to keep them around if they are not producing, but it is a "stew hen" and needs a longer and slower cook time than a fresh and young bird. The young females from that year would replace the older hens and roos that would be leaving for freezer camp. We use colored bands or in the older days you tied colored string on the birds legs or marked them so you knew what year the birds are from. This allowed for proper rotation. A regular chicken does not get as fat and big as the chickens you see n the store and the meat is a different color as we allow them to eat things like grass, bugs, etc. so the meat is not white.

[danielcurtis]

The thing is chickens used to be cheap to feed. They would hang around eating bugs and scraps too small for other animals. Perfect for a few dozen birds just build a house for em. However start feeding them corn and housing thousands the economics change and you don’t have enough bugs or anything.
Chicken was once cheap then expensive than cheap again within less than a century.
Chicken is definitely the most politically charged source of meat.

[LokiBJH]

I got to use this video in one of my classes to help out on an assignment. I knew a little bit about chick sexing, but not the ties to Japan and WWII. Thank you for the awesome info!

[danielvest]

My uncle tried starting a chicken farm - he got the chicks unsexed to save money. Ended up with 3 chickens and 47 roosters.

[pickles]

People that don't think eating eggs is cruel are forgetting that half of the chickens are roosters and killed shortly after hatching, most people don't even realise that, just like they don't realise cows don't just automatically make milk

[ALAE]

They had that “look at the picture and guess the word” learning crap at my childs school. It failed for him, he couldn’t read until he got traditional phonetic help. They eventually went back to phonetics in the tuition but not until there was a couple generations of illiterate kids, unfortunately two of mine😣

[niravdarmesh]

I gave a lecture, recently, gave a lecture on Translation versus Interpretation. This is a prime example of such a thing. It simply boils down to this: Knowledge versus Understanding.

[jacara]

Programmers have a similar skill. If you do a lot of programming you can glance at a program and kinda just understand what it does or where the errors are. I've done the same in Electronics troubleshooting. I can look at a circuit and just kinda know where the problem is at a glance.

[Erewhon]

Old hens (& old birds period) are usually made into stew or other slow cooked foods (coq au vin for the fancier foods). This turns tough connective tissue (the problem with old animals) into gelatin and flavor, leaving the meat reasonably tender. A "McNugget" made from pulverized meat is probably palatable from an old bird, but a fried chunk of meat from an old bird would be tough and therefore unpleasant.