Before reading this article, please click "Follow", which is not only convenient for you to discuss and share, but also can bring you a different sense of participation, thank you for your support!
Text丨Bored look at the day
Edit丨Boredom look at the day
Did you know that China alone produces 400 billion eggs every year, and hundreds of millions of chicks are successfully hatched.
Chicken and eggs not only meet the nutritional needs of our humans, but also meet the nutritional needs of pets, and more than 7 billion chicks around the world face the fate of being crushed at birth every day, and then processed into various cat and dog foods.
Where have all the roosters gone
In supermarkets and wet markets, we often see that almost all the chicken sold is hens. The figure of a rooster is extremely rare.
It stands to reason that the number of male and female hens hatched should be roughly equal. But why is it that hens are everywhere now, but roosters are rare?
We need to think about this from many aspects. The price of broilers is very cheap these days, and for many low-income families, chicken is one of the main sources of protein.
Because of this, the importance of eggs is further highlighted. Hens can produce one egg per day, which reduces the cost of raising chickens.
Globally, the production and consumption of eggs are growing rapidly. According to the statistics of 2018, the global egg production has exceeded 1.3 trillion that year.
It can be seen how huge the global demand for laying hens is.
The mass production and consumption of eggs has pushed up the value of hens, making them an important part of the chicken production line.
In order to meet the huge market demand, large-scale farms will select a small number of roosters of excellent breeds for artificial insemination, so that one rooster can fertilize 10-15 hens.
This drastically reduces the number of roosters in demand, while other roosters are disposed of shortly after birth.
In fact, the growth cycle of male and female hens is also very different. It takes about 5 months for hens to start laying eggs, while cocks grow more slowly, taking about 8 months to reach sexual maturity.
This also leads to a higher cost of raising roosters, and it is undoubtedly more economical for producers to choose hens.
So the low cost and the high demand for laying hens have combined to lead to a shortage of roosters. Most of them have been eliminated in the breeding process and have become "victims" of the mass production of hens in breeder factories. This also seems to explain why roosters are rarely seen on the market.
How to distinguish between male and female in a newborn chick
There will be a clear difference between male and female hens when they grow up, but there is no difference in the appearance of the chicks that have just come out of the shell. At this time, you can only rely on the accurate judgment of professionals to find out all the little roosters.
They gently grasp the chick in their hands and use their thumb and forefinger to open the chick anus. Carefully inspect the tissues next to the anus, and if there is a small white protrusion, it is the rooster, and if there is no protrusion, it is the hen. This seemingly simple judgment has an accuracy rate of up to 98%.
Why is the method so accurate? It turns out that in animal anatomy, there are subtle differences in the structure of the reproductive system of roosters and hens. These differences are evident in adult chickens, but they can also be traced in newborn chicks, namely the tissue morphology of the anus.
A skilled staff member can judge the sex of tens of thousands of chicks in a day. This job has even evolved into a profession in Japan, called "chick gender judge", and it is still a high-paying profession.
Where did the identified little go?
Only a very small percentage of the hatched roosters are left behind as breeders. The rest of the baby roosters were sent on the conveyor belt without even a mouthful of feed after birth. Their lives also began to count down with the push of the conveyor belt.
Because what awaits them at the end of the conveyor belt is a high-speed blender, and the chicks that fall into it will be instantly squeezed into a pile of puree.
After it comes out of the machine, it is finally made into pet food and becomes a nutritious product for their mouths.
Many people will feel very uncomfortable when they see this, and think that these little roosters are so pitiful that they die without even eating a mouthful of food and water.
Why don't you raise it and sell it again
From the perspective of economic benefits, these are laying hens and roosters, and it is very cost-effective to raise them and then sell them.
First, laying hens and broilers are essentially two different breeds of chicken. Laying hens are mainly egg-laying and have a long growth cycle, while broilers are designed to grow meat quickly, and the slaughter cycle is only about 50 days.
If the laying hens are to be raised, it is expected to take at least 150 days to reach the right slaughter weight, during which feed consumption will be much higher than that of broilers.
Second, the market price of a ton of chicken feed has reached 3,000 yuan. Based on the daily diet of 100 grams per chicken, every additional day of feeding of 10,000 young roosters increases the cost of one ton of chicken feed. If calculated according to the 150-day breeding cycle, every 10,000 young roosters will consume an additional 150 tons of chicken feed, which is equivalent to a market price of up to 450,000 yuan. This undoubtedly greatly increases the cost of feeding.
Third, even if it costs a lot of money to raise and sell, the meat quality of the laying hen is not as tender as the broiler, and the market demand is not high.
Only eggs that hatch will produce hens
In the face of the growing demand for egg products, how to improve the breeding efficiency of laying hens has become a problem to be solved.
In 2018, German scientists determined the sex of the embryo by extracting part of the egg liquid and using DNA identification, but this technology was ultimately difficult to promote due to its high cost and low efficiency.
Now, scientists at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation have developed a new screening method that is even more promising.
The principle of this method is to implant the protein contained in the anemone, which can emit red light under a certain specific light, into the Z chromosome of the hen through genetic recombination technology.
Chickens have a W and Z on their chromosomes, where a hen has two chromosomes, W and Z, while a rooster has only two Zs.
If it is an egg laid by a hen implanted with a sea anemone gene, the hen's W chromosome and the rooster's Z chromosome will not change color after special lighting.
If the hen Z chromosome is combined with the rooster Z chromosome, it will show a special orange red color in the light.
This technology could theoretically achieve the goal of breeding only hens. However, it remains to be seen how public acceptance and safety assessments of gene-edited foods will be.
Could the implantation of anemone functional genes into poultry pose a health hazard through the food chain? Environmentalists and anti-GM food groups may also be skeptical.