Old farmers leg test for sexing

[Dinosaur Village Keeper]

Yeah, I'd been thinking for a few days now I ought to update on them, whoops! I do have just one chick in that younger set that I'm still not 100% sure on; I haven't decided if she's a pullet with a bit more comb than I would expect or a cockerel that's behind the others in development. I feel like she's most likely a pullet, but I just am not positive.

But out of the other 8 in that group, there are 4 cockerels and 4 pullets.

The three that had one leg out and one in, they did this inconsistently for the days following that I kept testing, and then I got busy and unfortunately stopped testing at around 3 weeks of age. Everyone else consistently held their feet in.

The first two chicks pictured with one leg out are cockerels, and the third, the Splash, is a pullet. Of the chicks in the same post with legs held in at their stomachs consistently, the chick whose sex I'm not 100% sure of is one of the first two with yellow leg bands. I unfortunately didn't keep track of which is which, but I do know she's one of those two. Of the remaining five with legs held in, we have 2 for sure cockerels and 3 pullets.

So, of the total of three chicks that sometimes held a leg out, two were correctly predicted as cockerels and one incorrectly predicted. And of the total of 11 chicks across both batches who held their legs in at their stomachs and whose sex I am confident of, 6 were correctly predicted as pullets and 5 incorrectly predicted. That means so far I have a total of 8 correct predictions and 6 incorrect predictions. A success rate of about 57%. If we assume the chick I am not confident about is a pullet after all, then we have a success rate of 60%. If we assume that chick is a cockerel, the success rate drops to about 53%.

In any case, this is not a great success rate, not much better than flipping a coin.

But, because of the conditions of my testing, we can't really say for certain that it doesn't work under any circumstances. All that we can be certain of now is that it does not seem to work in Cochin bantams. I very likely will not have anything but Cochin bantams in my brooder for a long time, so that's about the extent of my ability to test this beyond just continuing to add more data points for Cochin bantams.

Slight edits for clarity​

Any updates? I would think these chicks would be getting to the age where they could be sexed by comb and wattles with decent accuracy. I’m curious how closely the predictions are matching the chick’s development.

Thank you for the reminder! My limited sampling ( I only have 4 of my own babies, and my friend had 6) results leave room for further testing! What I learned from this testing:

-A sickly chick, in my case, a terrible mama that kept trampling them, is most likely to tuck their legs whether male or female.
-Some breeds are going to be more accurate than others. For example, testing a dozen Brahmas that are the same age is probably going to give good results using this method. This was obvious from the woman at TS who tested a bunch of sexed chicks of the same breed.
-My chicks failed the test miserably. Of the first 2 babies, 50% were correct, and of the second 2 babies, 50% were correct (the inaccurate one was the one nearly killed by the mama). Of my friends 6 babies, 67% were accurate. Her Brahmas were 100%.
-The way they put their legs reverses at some point, making it even more difficult to tell!
-Many people on backyard chickens are complete jerks about testing fun methods such as this when no harm whatsoever comes from doing it! Instead of responding with their results or that they themselves tried the simple tests, they criticize and bad mouth people that want to try these things. And for what? I guess so we can all learn which people on Backyard Chickens we should RUN from! So rude and unhelpful.

I liked doing this test. I hope it helped some people, and I hope it inspired others to do their own fun tests!

 

[SueT]

I found it really interesting to follow. Thanks for the upddates!