Nantou County resident Lu Yao-ping (呂瑤萍), 49, has worked as a chick sexer since high school.
The profession of examining chicks to determine their gender was passed on to her by her father, who she worked under as an apprentice starting in her senior year of high school, Lu said.
A lot of experience is needed to develop the skill, Lu said, adding that she made many mistakes in her first year on the job.
Photo: Chang Hsuan-che, Taipei Times
Lu did not graduate from her apprenticeship until she was 20 years old, she said.
Sexing requires experience, because the identification is made solely by spreading the chick’s genitals and scrutinizing them for tiny sex organs, all of which is done by hand and with the naked eye, she said.
Chicks are frail, so using too much force could prove fatal, while prolonged exposure to lamp light is also unhealthy, she said.
The profession attracts few young people, because sexers must work surrounded by farm smells, which might cause allergies, Lu said, adding that a high tolerance for filth is necessary for the job, as the chicks often have feces on them.
“Chick sexing is a not a popular profession; almost everybody was born into it. I only know about a dozen sexers in central Taiwan,” she said.
Due to the high-skill and high-demand nature of the work, chick sexers are called in by farms all over the nation and an experienced sexer’s annual pay is about NT$1 million (US$33,028), Lu said.
Chick sexing is paid at a rate of about NT$0.5 per chick for most domestic chickens and NT$0.8 per chick for guinea fowls, as they are harder to examine, she said.
When asked about any strange or memorable incidents, Lu said she once worked at a farm that used too many hormones on the hens, which resulted in chicks that appeared to be female, but were actually found to be male after dissection.
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