I thought this was going to be about the Chicken F*er from South Park.
Posted on 07/28/2003 1:01:37 PM PDT by presidio9
This is the region home to France's "Rolls-Royce of chickens", the Bresse chicken, and with summer hatching in full swing the huge chicken shed was a sea of yellow, boxes of cheeping day-old chicks lined up as far as the eye could see.
Like farmers of fine free-range poultry the world over, in this season chicken-farmers of the Bresse region gear up to produce the tasty fattened hens and capons that in a few months will grace Christmas and New Year tables.
But as the thousands of fluffy chicks break out of their eggs, producers of what has become recognised as the world's best and most expensive poultry need to know which are pullets (females) and which are cockerels (males).
And this is where the chicken sexer, one of the world's most specialised occupations, comes in.
Sorting the boys from the girls is crucial to determining the feed and the fate of the birds, thus vital to the economics of the farm, but it is no easy task.
In France, there are about 100 sexers, most of them of Japanese origin, and all of them Asian. They have come to know by heart the roads and the lanes of the country's poultry regions -- the Ain (home to the Bresse chickens), the Gers and the Sarthe.
At this poultry yard at Viriat, located between Lyon and Geneva, Kazuo Matsushita, who is 39 and who trained for two years at a specialist centre 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 repoductive 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 practised 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.
"This," said the former European champion sexer, "is no problem". He said he had won his champion's title for "treating 100 chicks in around four minutes with a 100 percent success rate."
A pro can determine the sex of around 1,000 birds an hour, breaks included. Paid 0.5 euro-cents 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.
Matsushita, who came to France in 1989, co-manages a chicken sexing company set up by another Japanese. 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, long hours of training and practice examination.
But specialists in vent-sexing currently are worried about the future. With poultry farming increasingly practised as a large-scale industry, species have been developed that can be sexed by visible characteristics such as feathers, colours and markings.
Bresse birds however since 1957 have been the only chickens in France -- and by extension in the world -- to be recognised with a "label of controlled origin," or in French "appellation d'origine controllee" (AOC).
As with wines and cheeses, the AOC guarantees a chicken's quality, and only birds from the Bresse breed raised in a 4,000-square kilometre 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 there remains a future for chicken sexers, though even amid the thoroughbreds wages are said to have fallen.
"We used to earn 20 times the minimum wage. We were highly respected," said Hiroshi Maruta, a well known sexer with 30 years of experience behind him who runs a training centre in France.
Because of the boom in the Japanese economy, the once busy chicken sexing school in Nagoya had less and less students, he said.
"It's no longer the hen that laid the golden egg," he said of the job.
I thought this was going to be about the Chicken F*er from South Park.
- Chicken Sexer
Math isn't one of the author's strengths. 250 euros for 5000 birds would be 5 cents /bird, not 0.5.
I remember this from my high school career assessment test (answer some multiple choice questions and we'll tell you your future). I think everyone was rated highly as a potential chicken sexer. There must have been a shortage and the industry needed some in a hurry.
"Please hold my cock and pullet, while I stroke my ass."
I believe it was a farmer-headed-to-market with two chickens and a donkey joke.
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