27/01/2019
"It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old ...
Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the s*x of a day old bird.
When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide.
The professional chicken s*xer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year
Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken s*xers spilled across the globe.
Chicken s*xing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity...
By some estimates there are as many as a thousand different vent configurations that a s*xer has to learn to become competent. The job is made even more difficult by the fact that the s*xer has to diagnose the bird with just a glance. There is no time for conscious reasoning...
The best in the business can s*x 1,200 chicks an hour with 98 to 99 percent accuracy. In Japan, a few superheroes of the industry have learned how to double clutch the chicks and s*x them two at a time, at the rate of 1,700 per hour.
What makes chicken s*xing such a captivating subject is that even the best professional s*xers can’t describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable. They say that within three seconds they just “know” whether a bird is a boy or a girl, but they can’t say how they know....
In some fundamental sense, the expert chicken s*xer perceives the world—at least the world of chicken privates—in a way that is completely different from you or me. When they look at a chick’s bottom, they see things that a normal person simply does not see."
An abstract from the New York Times Bestseller "Moonwalking with Einstein" (Joshua Foer).
