hatcheries -who's a hen and who's a roo

[lorain's fids]

I had posted yesterday about having to rehome my 16 week old Dominique who has turned out to be a rooster. When I bought my 6 baby chicks I was told there is a 10% chance that they could turn out to be a roo. Me having to re home" Charles" ( who up until the other day was Charolette) is making me very sad. I have had him since he was 2 days old. He is a very friendly guy. I attribute that to interacting with him and the girls on a daily basis. If there was a way for the hatchery to sex them and be 100% positive that they were all hens, I would have gladly paid more money for them. Now after 16 weeks I will be having to say goodbye.

From reading other posts, I know this happens ALL the time. There just has to be a better way to sex the chicks.

 

[CMV]

Nope, sorry. Actually, chicken sexers are a dying profession because there is simply not the demand there once was for them. It's not as easy as you would think to sex chicks- you need to take about a second to identify whether a bird is male or female, and then you need to do that thousands more times over the course of a day, every day. I think I would end up in a padded room after a week.

Sorry you had to get rid of your roo. At least yours sounded like a nice guy. My accidental roo that came in my sexed pullets was as nasty and rotten as could be.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Yeah, there was a show, I think Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, that showed chick sexing. The was developed in Japan and the people doing it at that specific hatchery were doing soemwhere around 80,000 chicks at a time. It was basically an American family of Japanese ancestry that teaches the kids how to do it.

If you want to be more sure, get sex links, especially red sex links. The success rate there should be well above the 90%. Vent sexing is just not that easy.