I'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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
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.
Note 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.
Yeah, 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.
Taking 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.
Roosters 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.
That's what Falling3 said. One species of rooster is shredded alive immediately after hatching. The other species of rooster is raised so it can be cooked and eaten.
Because the traits beneficial to meat production (like growth rate, muscle development etc) are inversely correlated to the traits beneficial to egg production (feeding efficiency, eggs per year, egg size...).
Part of that is that the animal only has so much energy to spend, the other is that when breeding for one trait, one invariably tends to neglect other traits.
It 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.
Life 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.
That'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.
'Adorable' and 'little' have nothing to do with the ethics of it all. In any case, it's amusing to read urbanites' views on chickens. I'd encourage them to spend some time around chickens. We have the insults 'chicken-brained' or 'chicken-head' for a reason... domesticated chickens are perhaps the stupidest creatures you'll meet. The biggest question one ponders while watching chickens is NOT 'are they happy?' Rather, it's 'are these things even conscious?'
Be careful, if those urbanites perfect their solar-powered lab-grown meat, they might stop asking whether rural folk are happy, and wonder 'are these things even conscious?' as they leave them to die...
Sure, it's got nothing to do with ethics. I'm just curious how people feel about this. I'm definitely not ok with it, so I want to avoid supporting these practices.
I also don't think the fact that chickens are dumb makes it less insane and cruel to produce, torture and kill them on a massive scale.
If it were, how about pigs? They get a really shitty deal during production in animal farm as well. They are supposedly quite smart, definitely concious and able to feel pain and suffering.
The happiest moment of their lives is probably when (if) they realize they are about to be killed.
Sympathy towards animals is admirable. But, there is a certain naïveté that surrounds this issue with those unfamiliar with livestock.
You mention pigs. We raised pigs. Not cages... just typical barnyard animals with acres to wander around. When a sow gave birth, it was routine for her to step on or roll over onto a few piglets and kill them. And, of course the runt(s) would die within days; we'd hold them by the rear legs and slam them into the side of the barn. Killed fast. Never considered using nitrogen to suffocate then. Never worried much about how many milliseconds it took for pain to travel to their brain in the moment before they were knocked out. Seems sort of silly.
And don't get me started on chickens. Domesticated chickens are hideous... roosters more so. Try raising a group of roosters and chickens and see what happens. They aren't the most civilized creatures. In any case, I keep ssying 'domesticated' chickens... I'm sure Whatever wild poultry these thing came from are probably normal. But, damn... I'm telling you... We have bred the IQ out of chickens... they are the closest thing to automatons you will find in a barnyard. I have more sympathy and respect for cockroaches than chickens.
I 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.
How 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).
Googling 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?
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.
Yeah 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.
Exactly, 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.
I 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.
Fast 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.
> 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.
Without 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.
I'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.
If 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.
Indeed. 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).
If 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.
I 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."
Any progress on genetically engineering chicken so that only female chicks are produced, or even better artificially producing eggs without any chickens at all?
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".
You 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).
Put 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.
I'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...
There 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...
Sperm selection ain’t possible with chickens, because all sperm is the same chromosome. The females provide the variant chromosome to determine sex, unlike mammals.
elsewhere 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%.
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.