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AnneInTheBurbs said:
So I have had this crazy thought recently, and I’d love to hear everybody’s take on it, especially @dheltzel .

With technology moving at such a rapid pace, I wonder how it will affect even chicken raising. I bet in the future, you will be able to scan an egg to read the DNA inside. This would allow you to sex the egg before it develops, so you could potentially only hatch females or males. Wouldn’t that be an awesome thing, to be able to select only females to hatch, and then the male eggs could be eaten?

I understand there could be problems like minimizing the genetic pool. But it’s just a thought as to a possible invention one day. It seems impossible, but try to remember how we can see galaxies thousands of miles away in space, or how we have cancer sniffing dogs.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program of chicken chat...
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Hey I'd be down for that! Although I'd be happy with an egg washing machine honestly! The best I got is being careful ish and using a salad spinner in the sink...
 
Auroradream26 said:
Thanks! Ordered 2 :)
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Last year we went for the heated owl and it worked well. Although because of the deep litter I had to make a platform for it so the chickens had to jump up and then drink. Otherwise they would kick it full of dirt and leaves. That platform worked well but it took up a lot of floor real estate. In preparation for this year I've put in two hardware cloth windows that open up the side of the coop, these access a chest high rail with 5G buckets suspended from it. I open a window, grab a bucket and refill it. Chickens access the bucket feeders/waterers by jumping up to a 2x4 rail and eating/drinking from there. That leaves the whole floor free for scratching and digging. The 5G buckets have horizontal nipples and one of them will have a plastic friendly pail deicer installed.

Hope the new system works, the heated dog bowl is in storage as a backup.
 
AnneInTheBurbs said:
So I have had this crazy thought recently, and I’d love to hear everybody’s take on it, especially @dheltzel .

With technology moving at such a rapid pace, I wonder how it will affect even chicken raising. I bet in the future, you will be able to scan an egg to read the DNA inside. This would allow you to sex the egg before it develops, so you could potentially only hatch females or males. Wouldn’t that be an awesome thing, to be able to select only females to hatch, and then the male eggs could be eaten?

I understand there could be problems like minimizing the genetic pool. But it’s just a thought as to a possible invention one day. It seems impossible, but try to remember how we can see galaxies thousands of miles away in space, or how we have cancer sniffing dogs.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program of chicken chat...
Click to expand...

If you could scan the DNA for sex, you could also scan for egg colour. That would cut a lot of time out for breeders looking for cockerels with the blue egg gene. This kind of stuff is already available if you have the money to pay for the science. Illegal in some countries, but in the US PGS is legal to determine the sex of a human embryo before IVF. Other traits like eye colour are possible too, but as far as I know only in research cases, not for the general public.

Hopefull one day there'll be a hand held egg scanner for $5.99 at cutlersupply.com :)
 
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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Hope you are able to spend it with friends and family.

For thanksgiving, my dog thought it would be a great idea to roll in stinky cecal chicken poop. Off to bathe her! Haha!
 
AnneInTheBurbs said:
So I have had this crazy thought recently, and I’d love to hear everybody’s take on it, especially @dheltzel .

With technology moving at such a rapid pace, I wonder how it will affect even chicken raising. I bet in the future, you will be able to scan an egg to read the DNA inside. This would allow you to sex the egg before it develops, so you could potentially only hatch females or males. Wouldn’t that be an awesome thing, to be able to select only females to hatch, and then the male eggs could be eaten?

I understand there could be problems like minimizing the genetic pool. But it’s just a thought as to a possible invention one day. It seems impossible, but try to remember how we can see galaxies thousands of miles away in space, or how we have cancer sniffing dogs.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program of chicken chat...
Click to expand...
There is already a procedure developed to test incubating eggs for sex determination. This is being worked on in Europe because the public sensitivity to killing males chicks is even greater their, and threatens the entire industry. It's still pretty far from commercialization, but has potential. The economics are not as good as the "sexed semen" that dairy producers are using, but it would certainly save money for hatcheries to not have male chicks being produced.

A little farther out is the potential to read the DNA of a chicken to determine it's actual genotype. So you could take the DNA of a show winner, or a very interesting looking "barnyard mix" and work out how to reproduce that exact chicken. I am looking forward to this becoming reality. Right now, you can send off a blood sample from a bird and a lab will determine the sex of the bird, someday they may provide a full genetic profile, so you could see what recessive traits are hidden in it's DNA.

Cloning of animals has become pretty routine, but birds have not been cloned yet because of the difficulty in placing a cloned embryo into an egg for incubation. If it were possible to bring back the Passenger Pigeon or Carolina Parakeet, that would be huge.
 

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