[I’ve had a chaotic schedule the past few days, so I’m sending a rerun this week. When I pulled this one out of the archives, I thought “Oh how I wish AI had stuck to chicken sexing.”]

Many years ago, I had a next-door neighbor who was a chicken sexer. No, he wasn’t a pervert. He was a professional who was very skilled at determining the sex of newborn chicks. You might think there’s not much need for that sort of thing, but actually it’s quite difficult to tell the sex of the little fluffballs. You also might be wondering why it’s important.

Well, that gets us deep into the disturbing world of factory farming. Male chickens don’t lay eggs, and they aren’t much good for meat, either. Yet hens stubbornly keep making them. So what happens to the more than six million unprofitable male chicks that hatch worldwide each year? They’re tossed into a grinder, electrocuted, suffocated, or sometimes drowned.

But now there’s a technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a chick while it’s still in the egg. There are several high-tech ways to do this, but the latest and one of the most accurate, you won’t be surprised to learn, involves artificial intelligence. An MRI scan gets a detailed picture of the baby bird, then AI quickly and accurately reads the scan and does what my neighbor used to do: determines if it’s a boy chick or a girl chick. That way the chicken factories can get rid of the males before they hatch, reducing the amount of suffering these animals endure.

If you’d asked me a few years ago what I thought AI would be doing in the near future, I don’t think I would have thought of chicken sexing. But there you are.

Until next time,

Avery