Japan's chicken sexers industry in decline

Chicken sexers in Japan once enjoyed well-paid careers with overseas travel and job security, but industry changes mean their expertise is not needed so widely, and fewer people are seeking to join the profession.

Chicken sexing - or determining the sex of chickens - is critical to lower costs as farmers need to know the sex of newly hatched chicks to match them to their next destination. Females are kept to lay eggs while a few males are retained for meat.

Chicken sexers can manually sort poultry at a speed of 8,000 chicks per day with 99.7 percent accuracy by learning to identify the external appearance of the birds' sexual organs that are located within their bodies.

Most experts in "vent" or "cloaca" sexing come from Japan, where the method of distinguishing patterns of birds' sexual organs at 1 day old was invented in 1933 and helped revolutionize the poultry business, with Japanese sexers in demand internationally for their skills.

However, as Japanese youths migrate to cities, fewer people want the job.

The demand for Japanese experts throughout the world is also on the decline, with more breeders using chickens bred with feathers that are longer on females and so easier to identify, a technique called feather sexing.

Atsushi Nodera from the Japan Livestock Technology Association, a sexer with more than 30 years of experience, laments the decline in interest and demand for experienced chicken sexers, whose skill has been compared to that of playing chess or other games involving pattern recognition.

Reuters