How To Sex A Chicken - Wisdom From An Old Timer

[Davaroo]

Mom Nature hatches out a roughyl 50/50 mix of male to females, on purpose.
SO you stand those odds of getting it right, without some sort of genuine methodology.

There are some tried and true methods for accurate sexing, but they dont involve dangling legs, spinning rings or tossing an old hat over the chick' heads.

WE love the lurid and rustically charming tales, since we humans love a good superstition. We repeat them and cling to them, even after we are pretty sure they dont work... just because they are fun.

The stuff that does work? Well, it's usually boring and so we dont twitter over it so much. It's always like that.
Try asking what stops egg eating sometime - you'll get some doozies... which dont work, either.

 

[Zahboo]

When we went to get our first bantams we were messing around while looking and trying to guess the sex. I'd go and say the ones that jumped up where males and the ones that just ran away were female.

SO WHAT DID THE LADY DO!

She grabbed a chick, a 2 day old bantam, by ONE wing and said if it yells, its a female, if it is quiet its a male. Mom was TICKED. The conversation was something like "NA *bleep* it's gonna yell, your going to bring the poor thing! Your crazy hag!" I do remeber I left with an empty box...

 

[mamaKate]

When I first heard the pendulum thing, I tried it on every person and animal that I could get hold of and the result was 100% accurate. Of course, I already knew everybody's gender so that may have been a factor. My feed store chicks register as pullets(which is what they're supposed to be). I'm going to be hatching eggs soon and I can't wait to try it there. Oh, and the Orscheln's clerk used the hanging feet method to choose my BO. He held her by the body not the skin.

 

[danielbrown]

farrier! :

Quote:
Today I saw the worker at TSC doing this with red sexlinks.

How did they come out??

He wasn't testing to see if it was accurate.

The lady asked for 12 pullets and he handed her 4 males, 7 females, and 1 big fat cornishX.

It did get fixed before she left.

 

[Chicks_N_Horses]

Ok, I marked all the ones that pulled their feet up as males and the ones that hung as females. We will see just how accurate this is when they are of age to really tell the hens from the roos. I did this on over 20 chicks.

I had 7 that had already been pre-sexed and sold to me at the feed store as pullets. Six hung their feet down and my favorite little pullet kept pulling her feet up!! Oh no, I hope she isn't a roo! She is the only one that acts different from the rest though. She loves me and flies to me when she sees me. She is the most active. I am wondering if SHE is a HE now??

 

[pascopol]

Quote:
If there was an easy method of determining sex, you can be sure commercial hatcheries would hire cheaply illegal aliens to sex chicks instead of paying highly skilled and trained professionals.

 

[Davaroo]

Quote:
I'll be dying to see how this turns out, although I'm pretty sure of the outcome already...

 

[tinners204]

I could just see someone try to sex a homozygous Showgirl. Pick it up by the back of the neck????????? Oh, that would hurt!!!!! And be hard to do.....

 

[Chicks_N_Horses]

Quote:
I'll be dying to see how this turns out, although I'm pretty sure of the outcome already...

Me too!

Especially with my favorite little pullet...my husband said he thinks she is a roo anyway besides the method saying that she is a roo. I hope not but we will see....

I will update on my experiement when I figure out which ones are which for sure, then compare my results....

 

[m2wandc]

I wish there was a 'real good' way to tell, because our feed store is buying chicks, they are ordering ONLY hens, but the place they order them from only garauntees 98%...and I have NO IDEA what I'd do with a rooster...we only want hens...