 A Chicken Sexer at Work
|
July 28, 2003 — With summer hatching in full swing, the chicken sexers — one of the world's most specialized occupations — have arrived in France's Bresse region to sort the boys from the girls.
As the thousands of fluffy chicks break out of their eggs, producers of what has become recognized as the world's best and most expensive poultry need to know which are pullets (females) and which are cockerels (males.)
Sorting the males from the females is crucial to determining the feed and the fate of the birds, and is thus vital to the economics of the farm, but it is no easy task.
|
 
 |
|||||||
In France, there are about 100 sexers, most of them Japanese and all of them Asian.
At a poultry yard at Viriat, located between Lyon and Geneva, Kazuo Matsushita, who is 39 and who trained for two years at a specialist center in Nagoya, was brought in to handle 4,000 chicks with the help of Junko Inove, 28, one of the rare women to work in the field.
Dressed in a sparkling white blouse and with a mask placed over his mouth, the sexer worked swiftly but gently under a 200-watt lamp, picking up each bird between two fingers to examine the chicken's cloaca, the tiny external opening for the digestive, urinary and reproductive tract.
The birds first are gently squeezed to get rid of "the droppings from the first digestion" enabling the sexer to determine the presence of a degenerate penis found in all males as well as 15 percent of females. The skill lies in determining the sex of this 15 percent.
The method, first practiced in Japan some 80 years ago, enabled the two to sex several thousand chicks within the space of a few hours with only a two percent margin of error.
A pro can determine the sex of around 1,000 birds an hour, breaks included. Paid 0.5 Eurocents per chick, they are paid a minimum 250 Euros for each visit, the equivalent of dealing with 5,000 birds, even if they sex less than that number.
It was in 1924 that three Japanese scientists developed the technique of investigating the chick's vent, or rear end, to determine the sex of hatchlings. The skill, say the experts, requires great concentration, accuracy, and long hours of training and practice examination.
But specialists in vent-sexing currently are worried about the future. With poultry farming increasingly practiced as a large-scale industry, species have been developed that can be sexed by visible characteristics such as feathers, colors and markings.
However, since 1957, Bresse birds have been the only chickens in France — and by extension in the world — to be recognized with a "label of controlled origin."
As with wines and cheeses, the label guarantees a chicken's quality, and only birds from the Bresse breed that were raised in a 4,000-square kilometer (1,550-square mile) area of the Ain, Saone-et-Loire and Jura departments can wear the metal tag that is a certificate of their origin.
So in the Bresse region at least, there remains a future for chicken sexers.
< news main
