New Way To Make Sure Tom Turkey Really Is a ‘Tom’

This old boy made it past the cull. Researchers are making it easier to spot male and female chicks. Image via Wikipedia

Scientists say they have found a way of sexing turkeys and chickens more rapidly, a development that could make raising poultry that much more cost efficient.

It involves a one-minute process involving fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to determine the molecular differences between males and females soon after hatching at least 95% of the time. This according to a team led by Dr. Gerald Steiner from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

Dr. Steiner says his method (still a pilot project) can even sex fertilized eggs in ovo.

An unpleasant fact of raising poultry is that, depending on the market, one sex is usually more desirable than the other.

Chicken hens lay marketable eggs, so in chicken production, roosters are more likely to be destroyed because, well, let’s just say it: Chickens ain’t monogamous. One rooster will call on many hens, so you don’t need as many of them. Tom turkeys, on the other hand, provide more meat than do hens. If human male breasts are called moobs, toms are bred to produce prodigious toobs.

Poultry farmers aren’t in the business of coddling free-loading byproducts with fortified pellets and studio cages. No, they aren’t, and so they are always hunting for a faster way to identify waste animals.

Small problem though: Poultry are very, very modest when it comes to parting their feathered kimono.

First, poultry boys and girls are outwardly identical until they are about five weeks old.

Second, both male and female genitalia are inside the body, and to see them, you perform “vent sexing”.

The task is even worse than the name: You squeeze the poop out of the chick in order to view the goods. Worst, there are 15 categories of poultry genitalia, making sexing a crap shoot for anyone but an expert with a lot of time and rubber gloves on his or her hands. Even then, it’s an objective guess.

Dr. Steiner’s project found gender markers in pulp germination cells from the contour feathers of 23 male and 23 female six-week-old turkey poults, correctly predicting genders 95% of the time.

This should cut farming costs by eliminating unwanted animals. It could also be useful to vets trying to diagnose poultry diseases, some of which are gender specific.

Given the critical shortage of families willing to adopt chick discards, unwanted animals are ground up alive, gassed, electrified or strangled.

Here’s a summary of Dr. Steiner’s findings.

And here’s a review of “Eating Animals”, an even-handed food-industry book by Jonathan Safran Foer.

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