War on the Male of the Species

It requires skill and ‘determination’, a job few others can do. Meet P Ramesh, the expert chick sexer of Pune

P Ramesh was desperate for employment. It was 1979, he had just passed his class X examinations, and his hard-up family was pressuring him to encash his education as quickly as possible. His search took him to Pune, where he landed an unusual job. He became a chick sexer.

Ramesh had never heard of the job before, and the word ‘sex’ made him cringe. In all his 18 years of life, he hadn’t ever spoken the word aloud, and now he was being offered a job as a ‘sexer’. But cultural affinity has a way of softening up the doubtful. The company offering him the job was owned by people from his native state of Andhra Pradesh, so Ramesh decided to give it a shot.

A veteran sexer in the company taught him the tricks of the trade, and a few days later he sexed his first: he successfully spotted a male chick apart from a female one. Doing it right day after day would earn him Rs 500 a month. He sorely needed the money, but it was the excitement of the job that drew him to the sexing room morning after morning. Chick sexing may be considered a lowly job, but as Ramesh points out, the success of a hatchery depends on it. “This is an important job because male chicks are useless to chicken farmers,” says he, “If a cockerel gets into the female batch and goes out to a farm and is later discovered to be male, the farmer demands compensation for the mistake. The chick sexer is held liable for the mistake.” 

Ramesh is 49 years old now and an expert sexer. Over a career spanning 30 years, he has sexed about 35 million chicks, which he claims is a record even by the voluminous standards of the poultry industry. By his estimate, there are perhaps 400 other chick sexers in India [the number couldn’t be verified], but few can match his pace. He once even sexed 25,000 chicks in a single day, though about 1,000-1,200 per hour is the regular scoring rate, and he works only five hours a day, four days a week. His spare time, he has spent on education, and now has an MBA under his belt.

Such expertise is valued highly the world over, and Ramesh has received numerous job offers from poultry companies overseas. “There is so much money abroad,” he says, “In India, there is not much respect for our job and we are not paid very highly.” Yet, the thought of relocating his family to unknown shores has kept him back.

Worldwide, the field is dominated by Japanese sexers, who first developed the art. In India, it was once seen as a job for women, but has turned into yet another male bastion, with Malayalees having taken to it with gusto; Chengannur in Alleppy district of Kerala boasts of India’s only chick sexing institute.

There are several sexing methods, such as ‘feather’, ‘vent’ and ‘pubic bone’ sexing, but Indian poultry farms mostly practise the vent method. This involves literally squeezing the faeces out of the chick to open its anal vent (called cloaca) slightly to reveal its ‘eminence spot’; if it’s a round bump, it’s male; if it’s like the edge of a wave, it’s female. Sexing has to be done soon after a chick hatches, as the eminence spot is visible only for the first 72 hours of its life, after which it recedes into the rest of the body.

Vent sexing was the subject of a seminal paper published in 1933 by Professors Masui and Hashimoto of Japan. It was soon translated into English as Sexing Baby Chicks, and the professors found themselves surrounded by interns from overseas who turned into trainers themselves and took the method far and wide. Ramesh also mastered the technique from someone who had originally picked up the art under training in Japan.

To be sure, it is not a skill easily acquired or sharpened. “I cannot explain how I do it, as speed is extremely essential. Sexing is done in a dark room. We have to look for the eminence spot under a 200 watt bulb,” says Ramesh, who takes extreme care of his eyesight; no drinking, no smoking, no household pets, no sleeplessness, no television, not even non-vegetarian food. “I go for a routine eye check-up every six months. We cannot even blink. The sexing can go wrong.”

In the past 30 years, Ramesh has never held a full-grown hen or rooster in his hands; he is paranoid of getting mites that could harm the chicks he sexes. Hygiene is critical. Before entering the sexing facility, he has to change into special gear to ensure that the chicks do not catch any infection through him. About 49 per cent of all the chicks that hatch at every hatchery are female, and these are valuable to the business.

At the actual vent examination, it is a split-second binary decision. Female chicks are thrown to the left and males to the right. “There cannot be room for error,” says Ramesh, whose accuracy record speaks for itself, “The female chicks are kept, while the males are culled.”

That’s right. It’s routine. Each day, across India, millions of male chicks are put to death, and in ways that would be unimaginable to most. In many instances, the rejected chicks are simply thrown live into incinerators. If that’s gruesome, in other cases, they are shoved live into gunny bags that are dunked into barrels full of poisonous chemicals.

Ramesh does not like to talk about his job. Society is not yet open enough for that. “The word ‘sex’ is the culprit,” he says, “Once, after a gruelling sexing schedule at Jabalpur, I got onto a train. When fellow travellers wanted to talk, I told them that I had done sexing all night and needed to sleep. There was pindrop silence… everyone was looking at me.” He hasn’t mentioned his job openly since.

Punesexer