Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer
a game about intuition and instinct
2022-10-15
a game about intuition and instinct
2022-10-15
i wanna learn to sex chickens. i’d really love for that to be on my resume
katie
I wrote this on a whim because of an offhand comment in an internet chat room, in isolation while suffering from COVID-19. It’s part fever dream, and if parts of it don’t make sense, that’s why.
There is no technique or theory that even the most advanced chicken sexer can ever teach you on the topic of sexing chickens. Indeed, the only way to learn chicken sexing is to sex chickens.
The best chicken sexers in the world hail from Japan. When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing the two genders is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, who will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, who are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.
Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which expert chicken sexers could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.
The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.
And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The students would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained up to masterful—albeit unconscious—levels.
Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, David Eagleman
Interpreting the metaphorical meaning of this is an exercise left up to the reader.
The point of this game is to—via the CHICKEN SEX INTUITION MAP—progress from a novice chicken sexer to an expert chicken sexer so that you can begin your career as a world-renowned, globe-trotting, highly sought after Expert Freelance Chicken Sexer.