Chick sexing is the method of distinguishing the sex of chicken and other hatchlings, usually by a trained person called a chick sexer or chicken sexer. Chicken sexing is practiced mostly by large commercial hatcheries, who have two different feeding programmes, one for the females (or hens) who are destined to lay eggs for commercial sale, and the others for the males (or cocks), most of which will be culled within days of hatching because they are irrelevant to egg production. A limited number may be kept and fattened for their meat. The chicken sexer puts the chicken hatchlings on the appropriate track early, enabling those chickens to receive optimal nourishment for their likely commercial role from an early age.

Different segments of the poultry industry sex chickens for various reasons. In factory farms that produce eggs, males are unwanted; for meat production, separate male and female lines for breeding are maintained to produce the hybrid birds that are sold for the table, and chicks of the wrong sex in either line are unwanted. Chicks of an unwanted sex are killed almost immediately to reduce costs to the breeder.

Methods of chick sexing
There are two chief methods of sexing chicks: feather sexing and vent sexing.

Feather sexing is easy, but it requires that the chickens be specially bred to manifest their sex in differences in the feathers as hatchlings. These are usually hybrids rather than true breeds, and are called sex linked chickens. Female chickens in these breeds have longer wing pinfeathers than the males do, which makes them relatively easy to tell apart. Most chickens do not have these traits bred into them, and the hatchlings are identical to all but the skilled eye of the professional chicken sexer.

Vent sexing
Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess.

The sexual organs of birds are located within the body; the professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female. Many professional vent sexers are Japanese, where the method originated. A seminal paper about vent sexing was published in Japan in 1933 by Professors Masui and Hashimoto, which was soon translated into English under the title Sexing baby chicks. After Masui and Hashimoto's discovery, interested poultry breeders brought in people who had been trained by them to teach the technique, or sent representatives to Japan to learn it.

Alternative methods
Small poultry farmers whose operations are not of sufficient size to warrant hiring a chicken sexer must wait until the hatchlings are four to six weeks old before learning the sexes of their chickens. At that time their secondary sex characteristics begin to appear, making it possible for anyone with a minimal amount of training to sex a chicken.

Pubic Bone Sexing
Another method of sexing chicks is by placing an index finger on the pubic bones. If the index finger fits, then the chick is likely a female.

Interesting

That was an episode on Dirty Jobs a while back...and a damn interesting one at that.

Ike

As one who took vocational agriculture for four years in high school (yeah, I was gonna' be a farmer), I can say I knew this, but not that I personally know how to do it. I bought pre-sexed chicks from a hatchery to get birds to raise as layers, and they are better than 90% accurate if I remember correctly.

It's a cruel business. Leghorns are (or were) the most common laying breed, and almost all the cockerels are killed because they don't grow fast or large enough to be good as fryers. Other breeds are used for fryers, used to be Cornish/White Rock crosses, that are good sized fryer birds in 8 weeks.

When I think back on the chicken biz days, yuck first comes to mind.

Sg

"When I think back on the chicken biz days, yuck first comes to mind."

It's said that reading about or being reminded of something can trigger a remembrance of an odor. When I read that, I could smell my Grandma's chicken house when I had to clean it out. Nasty.......

It reminded me of cleaning eggs. I hated that. We'd get crap under finger nails. I didn't even like eating our home harvested eggs because I cracked a fertilized one once. A half developed baby chick was inside.

Jgrizzle, never crack an egg taken from a nest in the barn.

I've done this, I'm no pro. Cockrels also have less tail feathers compared to hens, and by week 5 or 6, some roos will crow. Between the three, you should be good.

Already picked out my victims for the next experiment. Yup, Capons. Sterilizing male chickens.

I always wondered where all the dead baby chicks came from that I used to grind into goo for the mink farm.

True story. Nothing quite as odiferous as breeding mink, I'm telling you..........oooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeee

I have 63 week old CX, 13 three week old Austrolorp/Barred Rock mixes, 12 laying hens of mixed breed, 1 rooster, 8 pheasants (1 loose), 5 turkeys, 9 quial. Didn't take that long.

I never really got into raising birds much. A few doves, some game hens, and most annoyingly, ducks. Started with three the neighbor gave me when she moved away. In four years I had 48. It was fun when they wandered about eating all the slugs and snails. They would eat so many that their craw would drag the ground....litterally. I remember Spring when one hen came out of the blackberries with 16 ducklings.......16! In no time all the slugs and snails were gone. Then they discovered strawberries, blue berries, and other goodies that I had plans for. The end came when they figured out to climb the steps and get into the dog food.

I'll tell you something.....you can't untrain a duck.

I gave them away until the others got too smart to catch. Then out came the shotgun.

Now, after 5 or 6 years, the slugs are back.

and the saga continues........