Related to this, I had been dreaming up an idea for a start-up for a while that uses computer imaging techniques to do non-invasive in-ovo sexing of bird eggs for the poultry industry. It seems criminal that we gas or drop into a macerator over half of the chickens hatched. It's just so cruel and seems like it could be done at an embryonic stage where they don't yet have the capacity for pain or sentience.
Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati...
This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.
The ones dropped into the macerator are the lucky ones. The ones who live suffer for their short lives, until their economic utility curve crosses a threshold value and they are also slaughtered.
I wouldn't say lucky - I'd rather go through the rest of life suffering than die at this moment, as there is a joy to be found in that itself - but I understand your sentiments. Very few would choose not being born over life, as you can't predict how life will be, even for these chickens. The chickens that live in my neighbour's garden had a horrible 2 years of life in cages, followed by a great 10 or so.
Reducing pain and suffering is better than not doing anything at all, and it's childish to assume that we can do anything more than regulate our food habits, and perhaps a couple of those around us. I'm vegan; I'm not deluded enough to think that my eating habits are anywhere near mainstream. There doesn't seem to be any end in sight for animal agriculture, whatever my personal feelings may be about that, so the next best thing one can do is reduce suffering where possible, and in-ovo sexing in hatcheries works a small way towards that.
I under that factory farming is absolutely ugly and there is a lot of low hanging fruit in how to improve it. But I never understand the extremist philosophy that no one should eat chickens or raise them in their back yard for eggs. Chickens simply don’t exist in the wild and are very far removed from the jungle fowl from which they came so long ago. If we stopped eating and raising them, they would go extinct. Is it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely?
Is it better for a species to live in often poor conditions or to not exist entirely?
if those are the two choices, then i'd prefer the later.
but isn't there a third choice? to raise chicken in good conditions?
i suppose maybe that doing so would reduce the amount of chicken we can consume, and also raise the price, but i think that is preferable to letting them suffer.
While I get your overall point, I'd just like to point out the island of Kauai (and the rest of the islands of Hawaii). They have a massive wild chicken population.
> Very few would choose not being born over life ...
Err, Moksha, or something like it is pretty much the goal of a number of religions practised by a significant chunk of the planet.
Many years ago I met someone who only eats egg whites. I watched him pouring yolks into the drain. I asked, why do you do that? He answered, because yolks contain unhealthy fats.
Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better. We discard half of all hatched chicks. I eat eggs. I decided to accept that ugly fact. If you don't, stop eating eggs and poultry. Or raise your own chickens. Anything else is hypocrisy. At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals.
Technology can help. Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot. Usually when I am buying or eating eggs it is easy for me to not think about discarded male chicks. Then I pray for forgiveness.
I prefer to buy eggs where the label says they are from free-range chickens, however.
> Maybe. If technology costs are lower than the costs of discarding half of the chicks, it will be successful just because it is economical. Moral outrage won't change a lot.
Killing male chicks after birth has been forbidden in France since 2022 though, eggs must be sorted before birth.
Moral outrage is supposed to turn into law and then it has to be done, economical or not. It can work, not everything has to be seen through the lens of money.
I'm actually incubating my first round of eggs today and we're trying to get an 8:1 ratio of hens to roosters. I found a paper from the early 1900s that documented the old way of sexing eggs.
After the egg is laid and has cooled off, a bubble forms in the wider end of the egg. If you candle the egg the bubble will either be centered in the end of the egg if its male, or the bubble will be offset and not touching the end point of the egg at all.
No clue if it will actually work but interestingly enough we did get roughly a 50/50 split from our chickens. I guess we'll find out in about 9-12 weeks if the trick actually worked!
The Circuit uses a laser to create a tiny hole of 0.3 mm (0.01 in) in the shell of all fertilized hatching eggs. A minimal amount of allantoic fluid is then extracted from the hatching eggs and placed into an external marker.
From https://www.respeggt.com/technology/. According to their own site, they are a for-profit organisation incorporated in Köln, are focused on humane poultry and appear to have invented this technology.
I don't know where you live, but you have to be aware of exactly what the labelling rules are where you buy eggs. In Britain, free range only means that the hens have access to open-air spaces, but not that the hens ordinarily inhabit that area. Considering the strict hierarchy that chickens form (the original pecking order), some individuals might never get an opportunity to be in this open-air space.
Organic is a different protected term in the UK that has additional conditions, such as a more humane limit on the density of the hens' accomodation and stricter dietary requirements.
It's a really complicated issue with some fierce lobbying from the intensive farming industry to loosen the welfare requirements, but suffice it to say that there is a 'euphemism treadmill' of constantly changing terminology depending on whether the factory farming or the welfare lobbies have the upper hand at any given moment.
I don't really see the reason for obsessing over hypocrisy in such a way. Humans are inconsistent and illogical in their choices all the time, trying to pretend we're logical machines is a practice in futility — one that many great philosophers have taken the time to tear apart over the centuries. I don't eat my eggs in a certain way because it's logically consistent, I eat them because I like them.
TIL an egg sexing technology has been developed and that this allowed to ban chick sexing. I am happy about that.
Re "free-range" chickens: TIL that this is not an useful label in some countries. Thanks for pointing this out. This needs some more research, especially what this means where I live.
> At least we can try to minimize the suffering of the animals.
I don’t understand the ethical framework here. Is it just that you feel bad? Then, why do you feel a need to impose your feelings on others who don’t necessarily feel the same way? If you are saying this because of a belief system, it’s unclear. Can you name or explain it?
I believe in Islam. Our God told us in revelation that He created animals for our consumption, thus we see nothing wrong with killing and eating them. (Our prophet told us to minimize the suffering of an animal while killing it.) Being omniscient, God has the knowledge to definitively determine moral and immoral actions. Being the omnipotent creator and ruler of everything, He has the authority to order humans to behave as per his ethics. Thus I preach God’s morality as I see it. From my viewpoint, I am self-consistent. Now think about your situation. Why should the feelings of fallible people just like me should determine at all how I should act? Are you self-consistent?
Hope this doesn’t come across as offensive, rather legitimate questions to think about. Feel free to point out any mistakes.
> Years later I realized that we all who eat eggs and poultry are not better.
There is a difference though. According to Wikipedia, the remains of female chicks are later used in cat food and fertilizers. Anyways, the idea is that it is not wasted. Throwing yolks down the drain is just waste.
Or at least that's what I've seen. It is actually not that easy to find information about what is done after chick culling. Almost all sources focus on the ethics of killing. But I think what is done with the remains doesn't get enough attention.
We kill to eat, directly or indirectly, vegans less than meat eaters, but there is no way around it unless we make radical change to society, and by radical I mean stuff like genocide or science fiction level technology, so, no. So I think we need to settle for the next best thing, that is making sure all that killing is put to good use.
So, if the chick remains are wasted I agree that something needs to be done. If the remains are used for feeding cats in a way that reduces the need for other food sources (like chicken people could eat), then it is not as bad. Gruesome, sure, but at least, it is not a meaningless death, that's what fed your cat.
The whole poultry industry is insane and "criminal". If eggs costs just 2$ and McChicken less than 2$, and company still profits you cannot expect an ethic industry.
If you are ajust a little bit critical and realistic with human endeavors, you should see that ethic industry is an outright oxymoron. Capitalism and Ethics are fundamentally exclusive. Whenever they claim otherwise, it is propaganda.
If you imagine the space of possible things we can do, the vector marked "make as much money as possible" isn't perfectly parallel with how most people would draw the one marked "be as ethical as possible"[0]. But the entire reason capitalism happened was that 248 years ago some Scottish dude noticed that, quite often, they're pointing in similar directions.
Adam Smith didn't phrase it like that, and many people have mistaken "similar" for "identical" when this is absolutely not so (we also didn't have a deep understanding of what's now called Goodhart's law until much later), but it has made a huge difference to the quality of life of many people despite the things it does wrong.
Also don't forget that we don't, and never have, lived in a pure free market, and that governments can and do pass laws to restrict what business are permitted to do — lots of money to be made in selling cocaine and heroin, both used to be sold as cough medicine, and then the law changed.
[0] phrased weirdly because most people disagree about how to draw the "ethics" vector, too.
Awesome. I only mentioned that one because it looked to be the only one that was non-invasive. It looks like you managed to get an invasive method to scale though, which is great.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I do wonder to what extent the MRI magnet poses a safety risk? Also these things are quite expensive, I wonder how the producers view the costs involved. I wonder whether fNIRS could be a cheaper and safer alternative. (Obviously, such a system is a good development.)
Yes, I absolutely agree that it is better to do this than dropping half the chicks into a macerator.
What is amazing to me, is that this is using MRI, which is a very expensive technology. Eg simple scans are very expensive for a consumer. But here, following your link, the MRI tech is in use, capable of acting 24000 eggs an hour, and can check not just for sex, but also for cracks in the shell, air sack placement, etc.
I'm surprised that this article left out how the training of the chick sexers actually happened.
Apparently it was:
- trainee picks up a chick and looks at the rear end
- they say "male" or "female"
- the instructor is standing behind them but offset so they can look over the should of trainee and still see the chick
- the instructor says either "correct" or "incorrect"
- this goes on until the trainee hits some level of accuracy
The thought here is that this is building a subconscious (some might say "zen like") ability to determine the sex. This is also why the successful trainees can't explain how it works: they weren't give explicit instructions to build a mental framework.
Some other examples of this:
People who learn a language organically at home vs in school. E.g. it's easy for me to translate Spanish to English b/c I learned it in high school. It's harder for me to translate Italian to English b/c I learned Italian organically and not via vocabulary mapping and class instruction.
Another example is the egg sushi scene from Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The junior chef just makes egg sushi every day until Jiro one day says "good".
but i get the point. when cooking myself, it often goes the same way. even for things as simple as pancakes. when a recipe says that the dough should have a certain consistency, that is almost meaningless to me. i have to try a few times and see how the pancakes turned out. and after trying enough, i just get a feel for it, but i still could not explain to you how it's done.
The pg quote is interesting, I strongly disagree with this part
> But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.
That would be only true if as a designer your job is to make things as beautiful as possible, or aligned with your own taste. But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately.
> If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.
Which then goes to the other large part of professional design; its one thing to have some "taste" or be able to evaluate a design, and another thing to actually create/implement/change a design. Indeed that is the big thing of professionalism in general, not just being able to imagine some ideal solution, but to understand what is implementable with the real-world constraints which include your own skills and/or time-budget.
There is this common division of hobbyists vs professionals and its often implied that professionals can do things better. But to me the big distinction between the two is that professionals can do things on a budget and on the spot, while hobbyists can pour endless hours for their passion projects. With that perspective its not surprising that hobbyists can accomplish better results in many cases.
> But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately.
Design where intent doesn't align looks very ugly to me, so that is still a feeling. Things feel right when designed well.
There are a few comments here related to how unethical the chicken industry is. Other animal production is just as bad, cows are treated terribly whether they're being raised for meat is dairy. If you are one who believes plants may have feelings or that the fungal network is actually used as communication between plants, the concerns would spread to them as industrial farming treats plants just as badly.
I wish more people would go out of their way to buy from local farmers, and that the government would get out of the way with regulations so that it could be a more viable business.
Its nearly impossible to start and run a profitable small farm today, and when production goes to an industrial scale all concern for the animals' (and plants') well being is lost. Everything is boiled down to numbers in a spreadsheet and producers rarely even interact with the animals at all, of course they won't care for an individual animal's well being.
Small farms aren’t great for the environment per kg food, and suffer the last mile delivery problem where the lion’s share of of the delivery pollution occurs just as badly if not worse than large overseas farms. You’re romanticizing a past that is long gone.
I'm not sure where you got this data from, but small farms don't all operate the same way and can't be generalized to a simple metric of "environmental impact per kg of food".
Massive farms get away with externalizing a large portion of their environmental impact. Does your data account for the impact of everything from fertilizer production and transportation to chemical use and ecological damage of pesticides and fertilizers? How is the environmental damage for the massive amount of soil loss with industrial farming even accounted for?
> You’re romanticizing a past that is long gone.
I'm not romanticizing anything and to assume that belittles the point. I agree that we don't have many small farms today and I was raising that as a problem, not a bygone era that we're better off without.
Your assumption that I'm romanticizing it because we disagree in the feasibility or benefits is like me claiming that emissions controls will reverse climate change is a romanticized view, and implying that its a waste of time. I don't agree with anyone that thinks emissions controls will save the planet, but I wouldn't disrespect their ideas for a different future either.
Large farms enjoy economies of scale that small farms can’t meet. Additionally, container shipping has to be one of the greatest innovations of the last century and is extraordinarily efficient at transporting goods. That overseas carrot could well has a lower environmental impact than the carrot grown on a farm tens of miles away.
I don't have time to dig deeply into both links at the moment but I can reply to the Vox article and research it links to.
That article actually makes my point. The consideration for comparison is exclusively the potential for reducing transportation a related emissions. No consideration is given to any externalized costs.
The research assumes that local farms will have effectively the same farming practices and that emissions on the farm will remain unchanged. They assume that feed consumption will be the same, even though local farms more often graze their animals as much as possible and will use much less feed than feed lot operations.
They even ignore the infrastructure required to make transportation work. They assume that the containers, trucks, freezer warehouses, grocery stores, etc. already exist that and that the emissions caused by creating and maintaining all that infrastructure can go ignored.
> cows are treated terribly whether they're being raised for meat is dairy
Cows are treated much better than chickens, and plausibly have net-positive lives. (But of course, there is a lot of room for improvement and many cases of plain torture)
As an almost-vegan, I think it's very important to highlight the huge difference between different kinds of factory farming, and eating cows might not be that bad. See e.g. https://faunalytics.org/animal-product-impact-scales/
I'm honestly not sure how I would end up trying to really weigh the comparison "better" when it comes to cows and chickens. I've experienced both industries first hand and find both to be absolutely terrible for animal welfare. After seeing them, trying to pick which is better feels like having to choose whether I would rather be shot in the arm or the leg.
I've been buying meat from local farms for years and usually pick up the meat directly from them, meaning I get to meet the farmers and see the animals on a normal day. I actually started raising my own dairy cows, pigs, chickens, and eventually beef animals so that's a whole different ball game as I know the animals personally and know exactly how they lived their lives.
The TL;DR insight is a good one: if NNs are trained on the concensus status quo, they will generate the OK results, not the effective or outstanding ones. The author is I guess in product marketing and says that this result should be encouraging. They point out that simply benchmarking your efforts against the competition also gets you just to the consensus status quo.
There’s also an amusing subtle shout-out in the opening chick sexing hook: people (correctly) complain that we can’t look into NNs to explain their inner working; the author points out that many skilled people can’t explain their decision making either.
I have seen this fact referenced many times at this point. You should look up what happens to the male chicks, it’s some of the most fucked up shit you can imagine. Search for “male chicks” on YouTube.
There are certain “sex linked” breeds of chickens that it is obvious whether a new born chick is male or female as they will be either color a or color b. We raise chickens for eggs and got stuck with a couple roosters before we decided to only purchase sex linked chicks going forward.
This is an article about subjective artistic taste and how its not subjective at all
all can be quantified and everything else is a convenient lie. our inability to quantify something is a deficiency we have in our data processing abilities.
Can someone provide/find the Japanese name of "Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School"? I'm curious about it and want to find some primary sources, but I can't even find the name.
I'm not saying it's bullshit by the way; I'm fairly familiar with Japanese, after reading https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%8B%E3%83%AF%E3%83%88%E3... it looks to me that indeed so-called "Vent sexing" was discovered by Japanese in 1920s (the exact year isn't very consistent, Wikipedia says it was 1924 for Japanese version and 1933 for English version; while this article says 1927).
But I can't find any mention about a school. I tried to search "全日本 初生雛鑑別" with various words of "School" in Japanese but find nothing.
Turns out that since the last time I started doing some initial testing with my university MRI machine, someone has already run with the idea in Germany and it looks like they have a viable product that customers are already using: https://orbem.ai/solutions-poultry-egg-scanning-classificati...
This is awesome, exciting, and I hope it becomes the norm for the industry.