Chick sexing
A chicken sexer is a person who has been specially trained to determine the sex of chicken hatchlings.
Can you tell 'em apart?
Chicken sexing is practised mostly by large commercial hatcheries, who have two different feeding programmes, one for the females who are destined to lay eggs for commercial sale, and the others for the males, most of whom are doomed to be fattened up for sale as meat. The chicken sexer puts the chicken hatchlings on the appropriate track early.
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. 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 is not easy. 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. Vent sexing is a difficult trade to master; many professional vent sexers are Japanese, where the art is taught more widely than elsewhere.
Small poultry farmers whose operations are not of sufficient size to warrant the hiring of 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, so anybody can sex a chicken.